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LIBRARY OF THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
PRINCETON. N. J. 


PRESENTED BY 


Tesi es 
HE 07 yal © AE GR tay oc, 
Division.dim As) po] 


NA | 








All Colors 








okt VEE 

SS 

A Study Outline on Woman’s 33) 1990 
Part in Race Relations \%, =A 
NSO f} Ain ann Wey 7 


Distributed by 
THE WOMANS PRESS 
600 Lexington Avenue, New York 


and 
ASSOCIATION PRESS 
347 Madison Avenue, New York 
1926 


CopyrRicHT, 1926, 
By E. C. CARTER 
ror THE INQUIRY 





Printed in the United States of America 


Price, in paper, one dollar, $10.00 a dozen copies; in cloth, one dollar 
and a quarter, $12.50 a dozen copies. 


Introduction 


The following pages address themselves more particularly to 
those who recognize a special concern for women in the exist- 
ing American problems of race relations—or problems con- 
ceived as such. This is an outline for study and discussion, 
and no answers are offered for the questions raised. In fact, 
the purpose of the outline is to enable the reader to face in a 
more orderly fashion questions that have often occurred to her 
before; and, so far from laying down the law as regards “‘de- 
sirable” attitudes or ways of conduct, the book does not even 
insist that she should visualize problems that are totally out- 
side her own experience and interests. On the contrary, with 
the aim of making our own contribution to better race relations 
(however we may at the start construe the notion of “better’’) , 
we shall do well, each of us, so far as possible to concentrate 
upon those aspects of our subject about which we can both 
know and do something. Yet, we shall not artificially limit 
the scope of this study; in many of the questions we are going 
to face, we shall expect to find ourselves entangled in larger 
social issues, confronted by the need of more concrete scientific 
knowledge, perhaps baffled by an inherent conflict in our own 
ideals of behavior toward fellow humans. So we shall have to 
branch out from the personal to the more inclusive, and from 
that, maybe, to a few underlying issues of universal signifi- 
cance. 

Moreover, while the sequence of thought given in these 
pages is not to be slavishly followed and while every question 
should be thought through, so far as possible, from the stand- 
point of personal knowledge, there is nevertheless a wholesome 
discipline in occasionally letting our thoughts stray to situa- 
tions somewhat different from those we face, so that in their 
light we may the better comprehend our own. We are apt to 

lll 


iv INTRODUCTION 


go wrong so long as we think of our problems as unique. In 
the same way, we shall do well to visualize the troubles of 
types of people different from those we know so that we may 
learn whether perchance problems which we have always asso- © 
ciated with a particular group also exist where the contacts 
are between quite different branches of the human family. 

The editors are not aware of any pronounced bias in them- 
selves that may have influenced their statements or their 
method; and they address themselves to all who desire to find 
the way of peace and cooperation between Americans of dif- 
ferent racial and national antecedents. But the fact that 
“problem” cases and difficulties of conduct are singled out 
for study may give the impression as though the sense of 
social distance and friction between groups were considered 
more typically American than the sense of likeness and har- 
monious relations. If this is the impression gained, the reader 
is asked to balance it by reflecting upon those group relations 
known to her that emphasize the possibilities and values of 
happy adjustments. 

It will be worth while to distinguish between two types of 
questions: those that assure a reflective and inquiring prepa- 
ration on the part of the reader for later participation in dis- 
cussion (as for example, questions arresting thought upon a 
point in argument or illustration that may easily escape), and 
those that raise major problems for discussion and are framed 
to focus an expression of opinion or narration of experience 
upon them. The former are, in this text, indicated by italics 
and the latter by heavy type. 


* Discussion leaders will find aids for the discussional uses of the 
material presented in footnotes here and there, but more especially 
in Appendix A, Suacestions To Discussion Lrapers and Appendix B, 
Summary or Discussion SEQUENCE. 


CONTENTS 


Pre TIONG eed ee Wat Lae ts tie 6 seu Mae eb ing pele Welle V 
Peet OMe ANG INEISNDOLDOO iii.) et Su ee yee wy ie 1 
MES CNOOMAUCE COMED ar osue bo ch meme nee 1G 


POUT ANC OCA Ahoy STI. sayy Sinema ti eS 

, IV. Church and Religious Association. . . . . 70 
Nee Husbandssand Children’ iii ir wel eins creek 90 
DION AION TADCCVAN KING an ue tate cau la heey LLG 
POPOL URS Kary rn yc. Mam ee iho! lt cyber cher aot Cel hE TOSS 
A. Suggestions to Discussion Leaders. . . . . . 128 
B. Summary of Discussion Sequence. . . . . . 130 
Peelenpics ot oocial ActioNe. |. 6° eure. es 240 
I. Report of an Inter-racial Group . . . . . 4140 
fuemmeconciiation Trips 2) egal kN 142 
III. The Reform of an Institutional Program. . . 146 
PME OR ATU UD iti, dei: Gl vend a eae Ee ee eOL BOO 


pac 1) SS EI eA eae eRe al) STR TIN NN Rees 9 Y 





ALL COLORS 


CHAPTER I 
Home and Neighborhood 


Should questions of race or nationality enter into the 
ordinary relationships of life? Does it matter what color 
the skin of a person is, what the name of his father, or the 
birthplace of his mother? How far can we disregard race 
in our personal and social relationships? * 


Perhaps, before we express an opinion on such questions as 
these, it may be worth while to apply a little test to ourselves 
and find out whether we actually do permit differences of race 
to affect our attitudes toward other people. The test which 
follows is not for the purpose of registering how tolerant we 
are, or of confessing how prejudiced we are—it omits all ex- 
planations, all questions of praise or blame, and merely estab- 
lishes how, offhand, without giving prolonged thought to all 
the questions involved, we should be likely, as individuals, to 
react to the situations described in the test.2, We shall have 
plenty of chances in later phases of this study to revise our 
opinions in case we desire to do so—and, in fact, why do we 
undertake such a study as this if not in order to revise our 
judgments or prejudgments? In short, the answers given to 

1 As indicated in the Introduction, heavy-faced type, such as here 
used, denotes questions to be raised in discussion; italics are used to 
suggest questions upon which the individual reader may find it worth 
while to search for an answer, whether through inquiry or through 
reflection. 

* This test has been designed by Professor E. 8. Bogardus of the Uni- 


versity of Southern California. See Journal of Applied Sociology (Uni- 
versity of Southern California) for March-April, 1925, p. 299. 


1 


2 All Colors 


this questionnaire must not be regarded as a commitment that 
binds the reader throughout the further progress of the thought 
to the views she has expressed at the start. 


According to your first feeling-reactions, place a cross (x) 
in one or more of the columns indicating the relations to which 
you would willingly admit members of each racial and na- 
tional group listed on the left side. Think of each as a class, 
not of the best members of the group you have known or 
heard about nor the worst. If you are wholly unfamiliar with 
one of the groups listed, place no mark on that line. You may 
place crosses in any number of the last six columns; but if 
you put a cross in the first column against a certain group, 
you cannot logically admit them to any of the columns 
2 to 6. 










Pee reyes | hall hoGl ir 
Renal Wy hs To my occupation Lo To 
or National] AS visi- | To citi- |_———_____—___—___|_ my | my 
Group tors only} zenship street | house 
to my | in my neat as my|as fellow} as | as 
country |country | SU vi - | boss | workers | neigh-| social 
ee bors | equals 
Poles yy us 
Chinese.... 
Germans... 
Armenians. , 
Swedes..... 
French 
Canadians.. 
Italians..... 
VOWESE ecin 
Mexicans... 
Japanese... 
Negroes.... 


———_— | | | | | Ls 


Scotsmen... 


Home and Neighborhood 3 


Remember, a cross means “yes,” and no cross means either 
“no” or “not sure.” For example, a paper marked 


oe Pr 2/3 anata: 
Ttalians......-- | x} x]oof | 


would mean that the reader would be willing to have Italians 
become citizens and work under her, but not willing, or not 
sure how she would like, to have Italians work with her or 
boss her, live on her street, or come to her home as social 
equals. 

Consider now the reasons that have led you to hesitate (if 
not to refuse) to associate in given circumstances with mem- 
bers of one race or nationality, when you had no such hesita- 
tion about associating with those of another. Consider also 
why one kind of contact seemed to you essentially different 
from another kind. (Even if you have marked every square 
alike, you will be conscious, surely, of different degrees of 
alacrity in putting yourself down as in favor of associating— 
or refusing to associate—with members of that group in just 
that situation.) Thus, without going very deeply into the 
nature of the relationships involved in such matters as common 
citizenship or working in the same place and at the same job, 
even a casual glance at these situations shows us that we do 
feel differently toward one group from the way we feel toward 
another, that our reaction to the color, name and parentage of 
another person depends on the circumstances under which we 
_ meet him or her. In short, we shall now be in a better posi- 
tion to answer the question with which we started: Should 
considerations of race or nationality enter into the ordinary 
relationships of life? At least we know that they do so enter 
—and not only in general but into our own relationships. 

In thinking over these questions, we shall have become re- 
minded of concrete experiences that have colored our opinions. 
And we shall now proceed to a more conscious search for 
illustrations of different types of contact with members of 
different races and nationalities. In order to have these remi- 
niscences count for something in giving reality to our views, 
it will be well from the start to make a more or less arbitrary 


4. All Colors 


division of these situations according to the attending circum- 
stances; and while we remind ourselves of, or tell others of, 
these examples from our knowledge or experience, we shall at - 
the same time examine them from the point of view of the na- 
ture of the contacts involved. Obviously, it will make a good 
deal of difference whether these are intimate or formal, deliber- 
ate or involuntary, close or superficial. 


Some TypicaL Forms or Contact 


For the sake of convenience, we shall now turn our attention 
to the one aspect of our subject which is usually called “social” 
relations, though, of course, the relations in school and college, 
shop and office, church and religious association, and others, 
are just as social as are those in the home and in the neigh-— 
borhood. What are some typical examples of contacts between 
persons of different racial or national groups in home and 
neighborhood that, to your knowledge, have led, or seem to 
you apt to lead, to unpleasantness or trouble? 

Just to set the ball rolling, here is a little incident: 


We were discussing race prejudice in our office the other 
day, says Sue, when one of the girls said she had none of it 
and could not understand it in others. We asked her, would 
she eat with Negroes? “Of course,” she said—and added after 
a while, thoughtfully, “I daresay I should give the dishes 
an extra hard rub afterwards.” 


Do you think that Sue was without race feeling? What 
exactly did she have in mind when she said she would rub 
the dishes extra hard? Do you share that feeling? Is it a rea- 
sonable one, do you think? How did you get it? Can you 
remember anyone, when you were small, saying such things 
to you as these: 


“What a face! You’re as black as a nigger!” 

“Wash those grapes, darling; you don’t know how many 
dagoes have touched them.” 

A little boy calling at you: ‘You're a dirty Jew!” 


Home and Neighborhood dD 


Have you a colored maid at home? Or a foreign-born 
washerwoman? Have you a Tony or a Joe to attend to 
your furnace or cut your lawn? Does their race or na- 
tionality make for a difference in your treatment—or your 
thought—of them? If so, what is it?? 


Here is another point: 


Is there any reason why some people prefer not to sit 
next to the members of certain races in a railway or street 
car? When a white woman says it makes her sick to have 
to sit next a colored woman, does she just pretend? If 
not, what is the cause of her reaction? Have any other 
peoples a similar dislike for sitting next to native white 
Americans? 


One inter-racial discussion group spent a considerable time 
discussing the following: 


Differences in personal odors are not often mentioned in 
polite society. Yet to some people it is a matter of impor- 
tance in race relationships. They say they cannot stand the 
smell of Negroes. Our Oriental visitors are much too polite 
to express themselves on this subject unless they are asked; 
but I gather from what some of them have told me con- 
fidentially that the smell of ordinary white Americans is as 
disagreeable to them as is the smell of colored people to 
some of us. And, while there is frequent comment upon the 
garlic-eating immigrant’s breath, many immigrants have told 
me that the breath of American gum-chewers is more than 
they can stand. Different ideas as to what is pleasant and 
what is unpleasant in the odors of cooking have led to nagging 
among neighbors and to the expulsion of many tenants. To 
those unaccustomed to them, even a German delicatessen store 
or a Swedish grocery are by no means gardens of roses. 

Scientific research has discovered no racial differences in 
body odors which, therefore, must all be considered due to 
differences in diet and other habits. 


*For illustrative incidents, if you can think of none yourself, see 
And Who Is My Neighbor? Distributed for the Inquiry by the 
Woman’s Press and by the Association Press, 1924. Cloth, $1.00. No. 
41, p. 33, and No. 45, p. 36. 


6 All Colors 


Have you ever thought what this dishke to have her use 
the same traveling facilities as white people may mean to a 
sensitive colored woman? * 

Can you imagine what it feels hke when you are entering 
a restaurant or soda fountain for a bite to eat never to be 
quite sure whether you will be welcome or whether there are 
going to be ugly looks or even hard words? ? 


What other forms of neighborhood contact occur to you 
in which no direct personal relations between clients or 
patrons of different races are involved? 


Many colored girls, it came out at a Boston meeting, have 
difficulty in shopping. For instance, when looking for hats 
they have been assured by the saleswoman that hats such as 
they described were not in stock. 

At a dance hall, each time that a colored couple went on 
the floor, the music stopped. Finally a member of the orches- 
tra, which was colored, told these colored couples that the 
music would not continue as long as they danced. 

In another large eastern city, a colored girl was staying as 
the guest of a woman well known as a social leader. On one 
afternoon of her visit, the girl invited the small boy of her 
hostess to attend with her a moving picture show which he 
had expressed a desire to see. At the theater the young woman 
was asked whether she was the boy’s nurse or governess and, 
on her refusing to accept that status, was denied a seat in the 
body of the hall. 


Supposing most of the people of your own racial group were 
laborers and domestic servants—all very respectable but not 
over-refined—and you yourself were a college graduate and in 
a profession: Would you never want to be in the company 
of people of your own education? Would you say that each 
racial group should “know its place and stick to it’’? 


But, you may say, will not association between members 
of different races lead to intermarriage? Must we not 


*Tf not, read the journey described by a colored student in illustration 
No. 147, And Who Is My Neighbor?, p. 146. 

* Read story No. 158, zbid., p. 160; any colored woman can tell more 
to the same effect. 


Home and Neighborhood 7 


occasionally sacrifice our likes and dislikes in this matter 
of personal associations (as in other things) in the inter- 
est of the social good? Must not we all expect to be ex- 
cluded from certain social privileges in any country where 
we are in a minority? 


Never mind just now about the social effects of racial inter- 
marriage. We will deal with them later. But do the associa- 
tions from which we tend to exclude colored or foreign-born 
persons really lead to intermarriage? 


Are we not perhaps hiding behind an alleged “danger 
of intermarriage” because we do not want to admit other 
reasons for our exclusiveness in this matter? 


A bond issue for the construction of a public park in a 
certain city was, to the surprise of many people, defeated by 
the vote of the colored citizens. They had voted against the 
bond issue because on several occasions the local Park Board 
had attempted to exclude colored citizens from festivals and 
other events held in the public parks of the city. They said, 
why should we tax ourselves for a “white” park? 


Do you think that the full and equal use of a public park 
by people of all races makes for intermarriage between them? 


A BirtTHpDAY Parry 


Lucy was telling her mother about the girls in her class; 
all of them had been invited to help her celebrate her eight- 
eenth birthday the following week. ‘By the way,” asked the 
mother, ‘‘what became of that colored girl who was in your 
class last year?” ‘Why, Ma, I just told you about her—the 
captain of the hockey team, Olive Barlow.” “But you didn’t 
say that girl was colored; I had no idea of it... . Good 
gracious, child, you don’t mean to say you have invited her to 
come to your party? None of the others will come.” ‘Why, 
don’t be ridiculous, Mother, of course they’ll come. And she 
has already accepted.” But mother insisted the situation was 
preposterous; in fact, it was impossible to go through with it; 
she felt sure if other girls (they were all from good homes) 
did accept, knowing that Olive was to be there, it was without 


8 All Colors 


the knowledge of their mothers; and that she, Mrs. P.. would 
be blamed afterwards for having permitted so shocking a thing 
to happen. So the party was abandoned on the pretended 

sudden illness of poor old Granny. 


Since we shall meet in the following pages many situations 
similar to this one, it may make later discussions easier if 
we try to think this case through a little further. Lucy and 
her classmates had already gone some way in the direction 
of including this Negro girl in their own life-affairs: (1) Hav- 
ing Olive as a classmate, they had accepted her with good 
will; (2) they had made her captain of the hockey team. 
Their action now would seem to decide whether they should 
continue in the direction of including Olive in new forms of 
group interest and activity, or whether they should virtually 
serve notice that a limit had been reached, that while they 
favored participation for a Negro girl in the interests and 
activities of ‘ ’teen-age”’ girls—in the group relations of class- 
room and playground, they must declare for separation when 
it came to the interests and relations of young women in home 
parties and other social groupings. 

Notice first the personal and social values that were at 
stake in this situation. There were, for example— 


(1) Olive’s feelings of self-respect, her social opportunities, 
and her loyalty to her racial group. 

(2) The friendship between Olive and members of the 
class. 

(3) A Christian or democratic presumption in favor of 
sharing experience across race lines. 

(4) A presumption in favor of preserving a distinctive 
white-race inheritance. 

(5) A community disapproval of steps that seem to lead 
towards the effacing of that distinctive race inheritance. 

(6) The attitudes of boy friends towards the social tastes 
of Lucy and her classmates. 

(7) The greater feeling of ease at a party where there 
are no relationships that make people “skate on thin ice.” 

(8) A greater social resourcefulness and enrichment in 
parties where people learn to skate successfully on thin ice. 


Home and Neighborhood 9 


Doubtless other social values would appear to any one who 
went around talking confidentially with Lucy, Olive, the other 
girls, the boys, the mothers, and others interested in the situa- 
tion. Notice, too, that each of these values would be ad- 
mittedly a value to all the interested persons, although some 
would feel more strongly about it than others. For example, 
Lucy doubtless cared about a neighborhood approval of her 
social choices, and had simply not realized that Olive’s pres- 
ence at her party might stir up neighborhood criticism. It is 
quite possible that with further thought she would have 
decided for herself not to risk the criticism, if her mother, 
who evidently cared intensely about it, had not closed the 
matter by a perhaps hasty use of authority. 

Notice, again, that the persons in such a “parting of the 
ways” situation may make their adjustments at any one, or 
at all, of three different levels of thought and action; namely, 
at the levels (1) of personal relationships; (2) of organized 
group arrangements; and (3) of social beliefs and principles. 
For example, suppose the party to have come off with Olive 
included. A guest of Lucy’s, who without having positive 
convictions as to the social principles involved yet felt that 
the group had gone far enough in including Olive, might 
make her adjustments in the matter merely on the personal 
level. Her social convictions would still be uncertain, though 
emotionally tending against social contacts with Negroes. The 
group arrangements she need take no responsibility for: it is 
Lucy’s party, not hers. But her personal bearing and con- 
versation at the party require care if she is to be both friendly 
and sincere. She must find ways to express herself which, while 
giving Olive her due of cordiality as a fellow guest, will not 
raise expectations as to her own future attitude towards 
Negro participation in social affairs. Lucy’s mother, on the 
other hand, might in consenting to the party have made her 
adjustment at the level of group arrangements. She might, 
for example, after discussions with other mothers, have 
brought about a neighborhood agreement that Negro girl 
friends should be included in parties where, as in this case, 
no boys were invited. 


10 All Colors 


Of course it should not be lazily concluded that because a 
situation thus presents itself as a “parting of the ways” chal- 
lenge, the answer must be an “either-or” choice between op- 
posed alternatives. The search for an answer begins, as we 
have seen, with an effort by all parties to the situation to 
understand the purposes—the personal and social values— 
that are involved in various courses of action. Some of these 
values may require inter-racial contacts; some perhaps do 
not; some may even be defeated by them. What we need is 
the sort of thought and discussion that breaks up the problem 
into factors showing what people are really driving at, and 
then gets people exercising their wits for ways whereby as 
time goes on all the essential and best-considered purposes 
will progressively get realized in forms that are satisfactory 
to everybody concerned. The finding of such solutions calls 
for a bit of social pioneering. We shall need to create the 
will to seek such ways, and also to think out methods that 
will work. 

Let us now apply the same sort of analysis to an example 
in which a similar question for social conduct was very defi- 
nitely answered and ask ourselves whether the action taken 
does justice to the different interests and considerations which 
we have found embedded in the previous case. [While the 
racial groups are not the same, the sense of social distance 
between them is, perhaps, just as great. | 


A social worker writes: We had a party at my home in 
honor of my mother’s birthday. Our college graduates mixed 
beautifully with friends of foreign birth or descent and of 
many occupations and religions. Among them were the Nor- 
wegian consul, the Hungarian steamship agent and his wife, 
the manager of the Polish newspaper and his wife, a Czech 
Protestant minister’s family, the organist of the Slovak Cath- 
olic Church, the housekeeper of the Polish priest and her 
sister, a plano teacher. In addition to piano music, we had 
Slovak songs, two solos in Norwegian, and whistling by a Nor- 
wegian girl who is spending a year in America. 

This reminds me of a party we had one time in M., Penn- 
sylvania, when Mother and I invited the foreign pastors and 


Home and Neighborhood 11 


their wives as well as some native American pastors and their 
wives. This group included the Serbian Orthodox priest, the 
two Hungarian Protestant ministers and their wives, the Rus- 
sian Greek Catholic priest and his family, and the Hungarian 
Greek Catholic priest. The wife of one of the Hungarian min- 
isters met for the first time and was glad to meet the wife of 
the Greek Catholic priest because she had heard what a splen- 
did woman she was and that they were talking Hungarian in 
their home. The Protestant ministers were much interested 
in talking with the various priests. 


Is it possible to mix socially persons of different cultural 
background without patromzing airs and without embarrass- 
ment? 

What part does the talent of a hostess play in smoothing 
out the differences between guests of groups that are strange 
to each other? 


There are two things worth remembering, as we look over 
the various incidents mentioned: Is it not often in the ad- 
justment of apparently unimportant details that we may find 
the key to solutions? 


How much, do you think, has resourcefulness to do with 
the ability of some people to meet a difficult situation in 
such a way as to give no offense, yet act in accordance with 
their conviction, whereas others continually stand per- 
plexed before the dilemma, “Shall I—shall I not?” 

Further, am I in situations of this sort really confronted 
with an opposition between my personal likes and a social 
obligation, or is it a conflict between two loyalties—for 
example, between loyalty to my family and loyalty to what 
looks to me a cause of humanity? 


In a later chapter we shall have to come back to such 
fundamental issues as these. For the present it must suffice 
that we recognize them and do not foolishly attempt to solve 
our immediate problems without regard to vital principles. 

With this understanding, let us now see whether, in the dif- 
ferent situations that we have come across, we have arrived 
at any conclusions as regards desirable conduct upon which 


12 All Colors 


we can act without too careful a weighing of all possible con- 
sequences. Here are in brief summary some of the situations 
that arise from the examples given; but of course the reader. 
will give particular attention to those recalled from personal 
experience because they will be even more real to her: 


(1) Joe does odd jobs about the house. He is a South 
Italian—a nice enough young fellow but not Americanized. 
How can we be kind to him without. making him feel that 
we consider him as good as our American boy friends? 

(2) I am forced to sit next to a Polish workman who smells 
of garlic. 

(3) Negroes are attending a band concert in the public 
park. I would have to sit among them to hear the music— 
or stand up. 

(4) My colored classmate has accepted the invitation to 
my birthday party. 

(5) All sorts of people, of nationalities and religious de- 
nominations that are hostile to each other in Europe, are com- 
ing to a party. 

(6) Colored people come in and sit at the next table in the 
soda fountain. 


CLASSIFICATION OF CONTACTS 


Supposing we now have a list of twelve or fifteen such situa- 
tions (probably there will be more, but some will be so simi- 
lar to others that we can leave them out)—can we in some way 
classify them as regards the nature of the contact involved? 

One classification suggests itself immediately: contacts in 
the home and contacts in public. Examples 1, 4 and 5 are of 
the former kind and 2, 3 and 6 of the latter. What is the 
difference between these two kinds of contact, so far as our 
choice of conduct is concerned? Which of them are more 
avoidable? Is there any good reason for letting our conduct 
in public be guided by a different principle from that which 
governs it at home? For example, which of the two sets of 
situations is more apt to lead to intimacy? 

Supposing we assumed that until we knew more about the 
effects of racial intermarriage it might be well not to encour- 


Home and Neighborhood ~ 13 


age relationships that could lead to intimacy between persons 
of different races—would that affect our contacts in the street 
car, in the public park, in the department store, in the soda 
fountain, in the theater? Would it affect our invitation lists, 
our behavior to those of other races who work for us? 

Could we arrange our dozen or fifteen situations so as to 
separate out those in which we face some large—and, so far 
as this discussion is concerned, as yet open—social questions, 
for example, intermarriage, so that we may approach them 
with a different degree of care as regards the possible larger 
consequences of our actions? Let us try: 


I. Contacts that involve possibilities of relationships 
which, widespread and unchecked, might lead to race 
fusion or to the effacement of our cultural heritage. 

II. Contacts that hardly involve such possibilities at all 
but that do involve possible relations which, if generally 
accepted, would lead to social rearrangements as between 
one racial group and another. 

III. Contacts of so casual a character that they involve 
no large social issues of any kind except that of law and 
order and ordinary peaceful conduct as between strangers. 


If we accept some such arrangement of our material as this, 
we distinguish, first of all, those contacts that give us most 
trouble because we are of a divided mind as to the desira- 
bility of the ends to which either of several forms of behavior 
might lead. For example, if we invite the colored girl to our 
party, we can hardly treat her other than as the absolute 
social equal of all the other guests. Does that bind us to a 
philosophy of democracy which makes no distinctions at all 
between races? Supposing we do not invite her, does that 
commit us to endorsement of the view that Negroes are an 
inferior race? In either case, our action seemingly binds us 
to a definite view of the larger problem of race relations be- 
fore we are sure that this really is our view. So we tend to 
postpone a decision for the time being, if that is possible, or 
to circumvent it in some “tactful” way if we can think of one, 
or we boldly make our choice, taking the chance that it may 


14 All Colors 


be a mistaken one, and that at some later time we may 
change our minds completely. 

In our second group we would put situations about which, 
it would seem at first glance, we can do little as individuals, 
because they are brought about by the sense or the tradition 
of the community, but where nevertheless we may, through 
our personal action, be able to make a difference. Take, for 
instance, the case of the Negroes in the public park. In some 
cities the issue does not exist at all, and this for opposite rea- 
sons: in some because no race has ever been discriminated 
against in this matter and, in fact, all sorts of people, black 
and white and yellow and brown, do attend the band concerts; 
in others because the exclusion of one race, usually Negroes, 
from the amenities of the community is so rigorous that their 
admittance to the public park is not a debatable issue. Then 
there are large numbers of communities which in respect of 
this matter occupy a middle position. Negroes do use the 
parks, but they are never quite sure of the way in which they 
are going to be treated by the park employees or by their 
fellow citizens if they occupy the benches or in other ways 
make use of their rights as ordinary citizens. And what has 
this to do with the reader, who, presumably, is a woman of no 
particular influence? Just this, that in situations of contact 
which are determined by the prevalent social arrangements, 
the individual still has a choice of behaviors which may affect 
the community at large. For example, she may simply do the 
correct thing, according to the accepted standards. Or she 
may do the unconventional thing by making the casual meet- 
ing of races in the park an occasion for demonstrating her 
own absence of race feeling—for example, by deliberately 
choosing a seat next to a colored group or by playing with 
colored children. Or she may, with others, pioneer in a move- 
ment for a change in the present arrangements either in the 
direction of removing present race barriers or in that of mak- 
ing them more rigid. 

Our third kind of situations requires a book of ethical “eti- 
quette” rather than a text-book of social study to help us 


Home and Neighborhood 15 


find the correct conduct. It includes those contacts in which 
no large social consequences are involved, though of course 
every behavior by one individual to another does have social 
consequences of a sort. Here we have the matter of sitting 
next to a colored person in the street car, in the classroom 
or wherever such proximity may be in the natural course of 
things without our having especially desired it. For example: 


A young student at a large middle-western university, with 
several other students, boarded a street car for the down-town 
district. In the confusion of finding seats, she sat down be- 
side a colored woman. As soon as she became aware of the 
fact, she immediately arose and took another seat. In so doing 
she remarked laughingly, and loud enough for others beside 
her own party to overhear, ‘Did you see what I was sitting 
beside?” The colored woman had not annoyed her in any 
way, yet in this manner was made the center of attention in 
that car. 


Neither your feeling nor your philosophy is in question— 
except to the extent that they must not incapacitate you for 
conducting yourself with a decent respect for your fellow citi- 
zen. But there still are choices of behavior even in this range 
of situations: For instance, there is danger of having friendli- 
ness mistaken for condescension, or civility for social recogni- 
tion. For those of the groups discriminated against in certain 
situations, other questions of behavior or etiquette arise: not 
to appear too aggressive or, on the other hand, to seem to 
acknowledge an inferior social status; to recognize existing 
barriers without acknowledging their justice; to accept the 
personal prestige to which one is entitled without seeming to 
belittle one’s own group. Subtle differences in the behavior 
of two people in identical situations will show the impossibility 
of decreeing a correct behavior for all. But while much must 
be left to personal sensitiveness and good taste, it may be well 
to consider the principles that should govern conduct in inter- 
racial contacts of this kind and, perhaps, to arrive at ways of 
behavior that do more than merely avoid giving offense. 


CHAPTER II 
School and College’ 


What do you go to school for? Why, to learn something, 
of course. Are you sure? There are quite a number of other 
possible reasons: Your mother may want you out of the way 
while she is busy. You may want to earn money, lots of it, 
and get a degree or something to help you do so. You may 
merely want to have a good time with other girls. 

Some people evidently go to school in order not to learn. 
“Let’s send Miriam to a good private school,” said one mother, 
“so she need no longer mix with so many Wops.” ‘The same 
idea seems implied in the answer made by President Lowell 
of Harvard University to a colored graduate who had pro- 
tested against the exclusion of his son from the dormitories. 
To some white students, being near colored men is not con- 
genial; hence colored men must be kept out. Does this mean, 
according to this college president, that it is more important 
at college to be in congenial company than to learn from new 
contacts; or does it mean that we cannot learn well in an 
environment that irritates us? ? 


*The question how race attitudes—favorable and unfavorable—arise 
in children, and how they may be treated educationally, is not devel- 
oped in the present volume. This subject, involving insight into child 
psychology and an examination of educational experiments, is being 
studied by a special committee of the Inquiry which expects before 
long to produce a study outline addressing itself to parents, teachers 
and all who are concerned in the welfare of children. 

*Read this Harvard case and other related incidents in Chapter V, 
p. 107 et seg. of And Who Is My Newhbor? You may be able to 
parallel each example with others from your own experience and that 
of your friends. 


16 


School and College 17 


Do you, if you are a student, know how many difficulties 
are smoothed out of your way before ever you go to college at 
all? 1 


In given circumstances—of these we shall come to speak in 
a minute—you may find it hard to know how to behave to a 
fellow student; but the college authorities, in all probability, 
already have done what they could to leave as little as possi- 
ble in this matter to your choice. You will meet, in many in- 
stitutions, only a minimum number of students of races and 
nationalities other than your own—the minimum necessary to 
maintain that the institution does not discriminate on those 
grounds; and in others you will not meet any at all, unless a 
student of one of the barred groups has been let in by accident. 
For example, a student writes: 


At a certain middle-western college, a Negro entered for the 
study of music. Her enrollment fee was accepted, and she was 
registered. But this was by mail; and since race was not — 
mentioned in the application blank, her color was not known 
until the day she arrived. Consternation! Consultations! 
“The daring!” “Must they intrude everywhere?” “Just look 
at the creature!” (All this in audible whispers.) Ugly looks 
—and for hours no one speaks to her. ‘‘There must be some 
mistake,” say some. (Business of going through application 
blank with a microscope to discover mistake—but there is 
none.) Finally the office admits the student is in regular 
standing. She is introduced. Some try to befriend her. Most 
intend to be courteous but can’t help being offensive in their 
studied aloofness. One girl (there is always at least one) is 
even more offensive to the colored girl by the patronizing air 
with which she adopts and coaches her—until she is politely 
but firmly discouraged. The registrar has new blanks printed, 
of course. But the girl stays and by dint of continual watch- 
fulness manages to give a minimum of occasion for offense 
even to those most hostile to her presence. She disappears into 
the background, so to speak, and only emerges at the end of 
the course—a winner. 


+ For the different uses of questions printed in bold type and in italics, 
see introduction, p. v. 


18 All Colors 


Have you ever thought what rt costs to go through college 
that way? Have you ever imagined vourself in that posi- 
tion? One travelled lady writes: | 


I have known of American girls of very good white families 
who experienced something of this sort in foreign boarding 
schools in Swiss or French resorts where, because of the type 
of tourist that frequents them, Americans are looked upon 
very much as are Jews in some exclusive establishments in 
this country. 


Read this letter from a student: 


There was a colored girl in my class at school who was 
all right, but she never would have anything to do with the 
white girls. We’d borrow from her—but she would never 
borrow from us. She and her sister lived on my street. They 
always ran to school; in fact, they were wonderful runners. 
Once in a while I would be late and have to run myself, but 
however much I tried they never allowed me to catch up with 
them. They didn’t seem to want to associate with me. But 
finally one of them got on the basketball team, and then they 
got to going to more things, and we got used to them while 
they didn’t seem to mind us so much. I think they thought 
if we spoke to them we were pitying them. I know I don’t 
like it when people who don’t like me are nice to me. 


Contrast that little picture with this one, from another 
woman student: 


In a large eastern college, two colored girls are attending. 
In this college you draw numbers to choose the house in which 
you will live. Those obtaining the first numbers have first 
choice. These ‘‘negresses’”’ were among the first and chose to 
live in one of the best houses. Now no one will go into that 
house because they are there. Even the college authorities 
have tried in vain to have them change. 


Here are two college students, one complaining that her 
colored fellow students were avoiding her, the other that hers 
were altogether too immodest and aggressive. Which is right? 
Are both of the correspondents right in their respective judg- 


School and College 19 


ments? What would people have said in the second case, if 
the colored students had deliberately chosen one of the less 
desirable houses? Would they have praised them for it? 
Would they have said, “Sure, these ‘negresses’ know how to 
keep their place?” And would that have been the kind of 
attitude toward themselves and their race that the colored 
students should have encouraged? 


Has it ever struck you how difficult it must be for one be- 
longing to a minority which ts under criticism (it does not 
matter whether as representing a race, a nationality, a re- 
ligious sect, or a class of the community) to behave in such 
a way as to please everyone and at the same time keep her 
self-respect? Suppose you were a Mexican in a place where 
Mexicans are looked down upon; how would you avoid in that 
college appearing either too forward or too backward? 


HANDICAPS IN COLLEGE LIFE 


When the students of a famous eastern women’s college were 
signing up for the school dance, a colored student added her 
name. It was crossed out. She signed again but did not 
attend the dance. 


A colored student at a famous mid-western institution 
writes: 


I was in a class which took a trip to a nearby city to 
study certain institutions there. We did not have time to 
buy breakfast before leaving, but after reaching the city we 
had a few minutes given us to buy a cup of coffee and a sand- 
wich. My room-mate and I were with a couple of other girls 
from our dormitory. At first we hesitated about entering the 
restaurant, fearing they might refuse to serve us. But we 
yielded to the persuasion of the white girls and entered. My 
room-mate and I sat at a table together. The girls with whom 
we entered were served, and people who entered after we did 
were also served. At first I thought it was a mere oversight, 
but we were not long to labor under this impression; a coarse 
looking girl, resplendent in war paint, came up to us and said 
in a rather loud, jarring voice: “Sorry, but we don’t serve 


20 All Colors 


darkies here.’ Can you imagine how we felt? We quietly left 
the place in anger and humiliation; and we were forced to go 
without anything to eat until one-thirty that afternoon.’ 


Before you pass on, consider what would be the effect upon 
their relations with white fellow students upon girls such as 
these if they were always to refuse going where there is the 
slightest danger of their being insulted. Consider also the 
possible effects of this incident: 


What could the white students have done to avoid it? 
What could they have done to ward off any possible ill-feeling 
or embarrassment after it had happened? 


Here are some remarks made by foreign women students to 
a sympathetic investigator: 


“Decidedly I found prejudice against my people in the 
United States of America, even among college students. They 
look upon me as an ignorant girl. I seldom talk about home, 
for they would not listen to me. Even if I tell them some cus- 
tom which is not too strange for them to understand, they 
sometimes sneer. This happened in a very small dormitory.” 

“T don’t like America at all. I am so homesick. When you 
all first came, you got lots of things to tell, but I simply have 
none. Some of the girls are kind to us, but very, very few; 
and their kindness has pity in it. Most of them look at us 
with curiosity and contempt.” 


Fortunately, there are also many expressions of apprecia- 
tion for real friendship and helpfulness on the part of fellow 
students and others in the book from which these examples 
are quoted—a book worth consulting also on other aspects 
of foreign student life in America: The Foreign Student in 
America—A Study by the Commission on Survey of Foreign 
Students in the United States of America, Under the Auspices 


*Many people use such words as “darky,” “nigger,” “negress” and 
nicknames for members of various nationalities without realizing that, 
because of their associations, they are offensive to these persons. It is 
best to avoid the use of such terms altogether. 


School and College 21 


of the Friendly Relations Committees of the Y. M. C. A. 
and the Y. W: ©. A2 

How the college authoritieés themselves may at times abate 
conditions such as those complained about by these foreign 
students may be illustrated by quoting from a letter bite one 
of the Southwestern universities: 


At this university there are not over a dozen Mexican stu- 
dents, all of them apparently of good family and in no way 
“undesirable.” Yet, the university community, accustomed to 
see Mexicans live in dirt and squalor around the town, has not 
made the distinction between the social background of the 
students and that of other Spanish-Americans which it would 
make, as a matter of course, between native Americans of 
different classes. So, while no one refuses to speak with the 
Mexican students, they are completely left out of the social 
life of the university. One woman student, asked about her 
attitude, confessed that she was afraid her social career would 
be ruined if she did not at least appear to share the common 
discrimination. 

Aware of this state, the president of the university called 
into conference the representatives of all the fraternities and 
asked why two students, who were Mestizos, had not been 
taken in by any one of them. Each fraternity tried to shift 
the blame, and the Mexicans were left out in the cold as 
before. Some time later, when application was made for the 
formation of a new sorority, the president refused his sanction 
unless the new sorority were to express its willingness to take 
in some Mexican students. 


Did this university president help the situation by that: 
action? What else could he have done? What would be the 
probable effect if the sorority took in Mexican students under 
this compulsion? 


EXAMPLES OF HELPFUL ACTION 


Let us look also at one or two examples which illustrate 
what changes in attitudes might be effected by extra-curricular 
activities not directly sponsored by the educational institution: 


4 Association Press, 1925, 329 pp. Price, $1.75. 


22 All Colors 


A religious association keeps open house for women students 
every day during the lunch hour. One day, a student rushed 
into the office of the executive, which was in the same building, 
with the indignant exclamation: ‘‘There are some colored 
girls dancing in there with us. Won’t you please go in and 
take them off the floor?” The secretary politely answered, 
“T will see what I can do,’—and then did nothing, feeling that 
she had no authority to interfere and that action of the kind 
demanded of her was contrary to the principles of the organ- 
ization. 


This executive was criticized by the complaining students 
for not removing the colored students and by others for hav- 
ing done nothing to reprimand or correct the attitude of the 
complainants. 


What should she have done? 


A public school teacher of foreign-born adults gave a course 
in Americanization at a university at which “100 per cent 
Americanism”—in the negative sense, 2.e., the sense of hostility 
to other than blond, nordic, native Americans—is strong. 
After she had led her class a certain distance in a more sym- 
pathetic interest in the foreign-born, she proposed that her 
college class and her public-school evening class meet together. 

The proposal was enthusiastically received by both groups. 
Some twenty native American students and as many new citi- 
zens of Italian birth attended the party, happily dancing and 
playing games together and entertaining each other with char- 
acteristic national stunts. As a result, each group had a new 
appreciation of the other, such as could not have been obtained 
without personal contact. 


And now, from the point of view of a member of the 
majority, how can I do just the right thing by the fellow- 
student of the despised minority without seeming a prig 
or a hypocrite or making myself very unpopular in one 
way or another? 


Before deciding whether you approve or disapprove the 
action of the students mentioned in the following letter, be 
sure you understand not only the motives but also the prob- 


School and College 23 


able consequences—to the students themselves and, if their 
conduct were to find wide imitation, to society at large: 


A friend has received this letter from the University of ... 
“Shortly before I left . . .—the last Sunday—I went to a 
picnic given for the industrial girls’ group at the university 
summer school—a group similar to the one at Bryn Mawr. 
I thought of you and of how it would delight you to see the 
two Negro girls playing ball with the other girls on terms of 
friendly equality. When the two colored girls applied there 
was quite a furore for a time, and the problem of what to do 
with them was very real. It was decided to take a house and 
to try having the girls live together. Two university girls— 
one from a New York Jewish family, the other from a well- 
known western family of English descent—expressed their 
willingness to live in the house with the colored girls and to 
attempt to keep things going smoothly—and it worked out 
beautifully, with no evidence of race feeling whatever. I 
didn’t stay at the picnic on the moonlight evening by the lake, 
so missed the Negro spirituals sung by a trio of the two col- 
ored girls and one white girl. (From The Crisis for December, 
1925, with omission of names.) 1 


Wuat Can AN INDIVIDUAL STUDENT Do? 


Here is a somewhat different case in which a single student 
opposed her attitude and judgment to that of the majority: 


In a certain New England college, there was one solitary 
student from India. A sorority girl, who was interested 
‘in getting the foreigner’s point of view and learning about his 
countrymen—you know, there is something very romantic 
about Indian students in particular, because nearly all of them 
are thick in nationalist politics—made a date to go walking 
with him. Instantly she was informed by her indignant soror- 
ity sisters that she must never do such a thing again. If she 
did they would expel her from the society. 


*For other incidents see And Who Is My Neighbor? One illustration 
alone, No. 125, p. 123, has served on several occasions as starting point 
for a whole hour's discussion in which not only the facts of the narrative 
but also the probable backgrounds and influences upon the individuals 
figuring in it were subjected to a searching analysis. 


24 All Colors 


The girl, the report continues, came from a good home and 
was accustomed to doing her own thinking. Instead of wait- 
ing until the excitement had died down, she thought the matter 
over at once and decided that she had done nothing wrong, and 
that her sorority had no right to dictate to her how to choose 
her acquaintances. She, therefore, made another date to go 
walking with the young Indian, and kept it. The expected 
storm arose within her society. Some members, as they had 
threatened, moved that she be expelled; but before such action 
could be taken the matter was aired through the college, and 
public opinion developed in favor of the girl student. This 
aa so strong that the small group simply could not expel 

er. 


Do you think this student was right, or was she only head- 
strong? Did she walk out with the Indian for the second time 
because she felt sure that the general opinion among the stu- 
dents would support her, or would she have done so anyhow? 
Did those sorority members who censured her feel that they 
had the sense of the college. behind them? Were they just 
snobs, or was there something quite sensible and of social value 
in their motives? For example, ought a girl to walk with a 
man into whose group she would not dream of marrying? 


A milder case, in which the question of male friends is not 
involved, is told of an eastern university. Here, in the absence 
of a Cosmopolitan Club or any other provision for the social 
life of foreign students, two American girls who belonged each 
to a different sorority and who both were officers of student 
organizations took it upon themselves to visit with the foreign 
students. Their simple act of friendliness was at once noticed 
by other students who ridiculed their looking after their 
“protégés” and told them quite plainly, “We like you, but we 
don’t care for your friends.” ‘They made a real sacrifice in 
personal popularity by sticking to their foreign friends. 


Are there different degrees of intimacy in college life, 
so that in some of its stages you would associate with 
almost anyone, in others with all but a few undesirable in- 
dividuals, in others only with those of your own race or 


School and College 25 


nationality, in others only with those whose family you 
know to be “respectable”? 


Wuy Nor Have SEPARATE COLLEGES? 


But here we are letting ourselves in for all sorts of specu- 
lations. Let’s look at concrete cases. 


Are there (or have there been) students in your class who, 
you feel convinced, should not have been there? Was this in 
every case because of merely personal reasons or sometimes 
because of their connections? Are there students whom you 
would tolerate in the class-room but with whom you would 
not want to associate outside class hours? Are there others 
urith whom you would associate in any kind of activity on the 
campus but not away from it? Are there some with whom 
you have no objection to associate but whom, you feel, you 
could not introduce into your home? Is there a difference in 
these respects—always apart from personal qualities and lhk- 
ngs, thinking in terms of racial or national grouwps—as be- 
tween girl and men acquaintances? 


Should people go to colleges where they are not wanted, 
or where a large number of people will be antagonistic to 
them? 


There are some good colored colleges, aren’t there? And 
if there were a great demand, money might be got for build- 
ing more. Or somebody may make a similar remark about 
Jewish students: “Of course, some of them are all right— 
but then, why can’t they all go to the state and municipal 
colleges where they have to take them instead of crowding 
in on us Americans?” ? 


Would students of marked racial difference be better off in 
colleges of their own? Only colored students or also Jewish 
students—or perhaps students in each part of the country 

*The word “Americans” is usually emphasized in such complaints; 


those who make them are apt to forget that the families of the Jewish 
girls may have been longer in the country than have their own. 


26 All Colors 


where their particular race or nationality 1s looked down upon 
—as, for example, Orientals in Caltforma, Mexicans in Ari- 
zona, etc.? 


It has been said that to admit a colored girl to a white 
college is no kindness because this only makes her more 
sensitive to the discrimination she is bound to meet with later 
in life. 

Consider the case of a girl in every way American except 
for her looks which she has inherited from foreign ancestors. 
We have heard much of the problem of the “second genera- 
tion’’—that is, the children of immigrants who are trying to 
bridge the gulf between their parents and their American 
associates. But what of those who, because of their appear- 
ance—which they cannot change as they might change a for- 
eign-sounding name—are never accepted as equals by those 
Americans with whom they have gone to school and college, 
even though both their parents may have been born and bred 
in the United States? For example, a student of Japanese 
ancestry at a Californian university writes: 


Gradually, as the circle in which I moved in the United 
States became larger, I met different people of various tem- 
peraments. My simple outlook on life became complex and 
more complex. I unwillingly realized that I was not to be 
classed as an American. It was one of the most heartbreaking 
periods of my life. I wanted to be American; I wondered why 
God had not made me an American. If I couldn’t be an 
American, then what was I? A Japanese? No. But not an 
American either. My life background is American. My 
ideals of life, of education, of religion, were all American. I 
knew the constitution, the oath of allegiance. I knew the his- 
tory of America from its earliest beginnings. I knew its 
strength and weaknesses, and its drabness and its romance. 
I loved America and its ideals because her ideals were my 
ideals. I used to rise up in wrath against any criticism which 
might be made against America, my country. But they tell 
me I am not an American; that I cannot ever be assimilated 
for no reason which I have ever been able to understand. .. . 
These things have not only hurt’ me materially but have 


School and College 27 


lessened my faith in human honesty, in human good will, and 
in even the Christian religion which the people of America 
think we “heathen” need so badly.t 


HELPFUL CONTACTS 


Is it necessary 1f we would learn to appreciate the minority 
races and nationalities in our country that we should know 
them by personal contact? What can we and what can we 
not learn about them from books? Can you give examples in 
which the representation of these races or nationalities in the 
class-room has helped or hindered the progress of studies? 


Here is one account by a student in California who came 
from the South and who tells how his attitude toward the 
Negro changed during his progress through school and college: 


One of the three things that aided my change of opinion was 
a United States history class in high school. I had always 
heard the history of the Civil War presented from the South- 
erner’s point of view, now I was to be under a Westerner. 
The teacher tried to present both sides fairly, and this spurred 
me on to study the question with an open mind... . 

Later I took a course in Americanization and wrote a paper 
on “Achievements of the Negro in the United States.” My 
research for this paper introduced me to Negroes who were 
more than cooks and washerwomen and gardeners. I saw the 
Negro as one who possessed a brain equal to that of the white 
man. At this time I was a member of a club that was study- 
ing the book, “J. W. Thinks Black.” Here I had an oppor- 
tunity to see the black man with a soul, worshipping the same 
God that I worshipped, and my idea of Heaven changed. 

The change was a gradual one which covered from four to 
six years. There were many indirect influences that helped 
me to change my opinion, but the thing that had the greatest 
influence was the United States history class, the class in 
Americanization and “J. W. Thinks Black.” In other words, 
the factors operating in my change of opinion were the per- 


*Journal of Applied Sociology, University of Southern California, 
March-April, 1925, p. 320. 


28 All Colors 


sonality of leaders and reading matter that bore on the 
subject.t 


Supposing we do want to use our school and college years 
to learn not only from books and lessons but also from asso- 
ciations with students of other racial and national groups, how 
should we go about it? 


Will any kind of association do, or should we try, at 
least at the start, to arrange matters so that students of 
different background and upbringing get to know each 
other from their best sides rather than from their worst? 
How can this be done? 


Contacts THROUGH COMMON INTEREST 


An incidental by-product of the international studies pro- 
moted by the Council of Christian Associations in the fall of 
1925 has been the introduction of inter-racial group meetings 
in some colleges where they have previously been unknown. 
This year’s subject of study was the reasons for and against 
the entrance of the United States into the World Court. As 
funds were limited, the plan of holding regional conferences 
was adopted in place of meetings at the separate colleges. 
This at once brought up the question of combining white and 
colored attendances—a procedure which, for the first time in 
any such enterprise, was generally adopted. The success of 
the venture, attested from many sides, has been claimed by 
some for the engagement of attention upon a cause of com- 
mon interest as against efforts to secure Joint discussion upon 
a divisive issue as between the races. 

A Southern student writes: “. .. Everyone was telling us 
that it just could not be done and gotten away with and if 
things had blown up (as they might easily have done), this 
conference would have become a thing to drag out on all occa- 
sions as a warning for years to come. But it went off splen- 
didly, and while there may be rumblings and echoes from it, 
it was really the most significant student event, in my opinion, 
that has ever happened in this state. For the first time we 
had an inter-racial conference.” 


* Analyzing Changes in Public Opinion by E. S. Bogardus. Journal 
of Applied Sociology, May-June, 1925, p. 376. 


School and College 29 


A student from another region says: ‘This conference was 
a new venture in this state in the fact that it was an inter- 
racial meeting on a large scale. The results so far have justi- 


fied the experiment. . . . There was a well balanced propor- 
tion of men and women, and of colored and white students. 
“The white men from . . . were too upset over the Negroes 


being there to think much about the World Court. It seems 
that whoever asked them to attend the conference had not 
been frank about the conference being inter-racial. It was 
not fair and was unfortunate that people should be put in such 
a situation against their will. They may have gone back to 
some of the sessions, but I know they stayed away from more 
than one meeting. . . . Finally a colored girl from ... pro- 
posed a resolution which was carried unanimously.” 

From still another university: ‘The morning session was 
significant in that it was the first time that colored students 
had been invited to the ... campus. Certainly it was the 
first time in the last few years. . . . Inter-racial meetings are 
not a new ruffle in. . . . We have an inter-racial forum which 
meets fortnightly.” 

An onlooker reports from several Southern conferences: 
“Colored students were recognized in a real way in every 
phase of the program from beginning to end, not only from the 
standpoint of listeners and followers but from the standpoint 
of contribution and leadership.” 


What contacts have you found most helpful to counter any 
tendency toward what looked to you like prejudice? 3 

Would it be a good thing to start by having a large social 
affair, with dancing, to which girls of as many nationalities 
_and races as we know would be invited to bring their boy 
friends? Should we try, first, to get to know all the students 
better through our common interest in class-room subjects? 
Should we make dates with them individually and get to know 
them more intimately one by one before starting anything of 
a social nature in a larger way? 

Do you think that differences in association between stu- 
dents in accordance with the nature of different contacts, 
should be left to the judgment of the students? Or should the 


* Concerning prejudice, see p. 88. 


30 All Colors 


college authorities themselves, after having admitted members 
of minority racial groups, make rules to regulate the degree of 
association between them and other students? 


The matter of dormitory assignment has already been men- 
tioned. Here is an example of another type of problem: 


The sociology professor of a middle-western university who 
was also a frequent representative of the institution in civic 
affairs noticed that colored students had been debarred from 
participation in a community chorus festival. In reply to his 
inquiry, the dean of the music school wrote: 

“Your inference is correct, Negroes are not admitted as 
chorus members. You will kindly bear in mind that the 
chorus is not a University affair, but a local organization, 
which restricts the privilege of membership, alongside with 
many other organizations, to the white race. This is not done 
with any feeling of prejudice. Of course personally, I have 
nothing to do with this restriction. With the children’s chorus 
it is different. These are taken from the public schools, and, 
as perhaps you have observed, a very considerable proportion 
of the chorus is colored. Personally I have every sympathy 
with the Negroes and am willing to do all I can for them, but 
I do think there are occasions when segregation is desirable 
for both races.” 

The sociology teacher answered: 

“FEivery time I have run across your letter of ...I have 
‘shied off? from a reply, because of a natural reluctance to 
differ with you, but my conscience will not rest without my 
suggesting to you the constructive possibilities of the situation. 

“We have (in this city) one of the best colonies of Negro 
people in the country. They have already a reasonable degree 
of community organization. One of our graduate students 
made an interesting study of their life and status last winter. 
I consider it extremely unfortunate that race prejudice should 
intrude in an organization devoted to the higher cultural in- 
terests, but if this be a situation which must be accepted, it 
should, it seems to me, be coupled with some extension of help 
or opportunities to this group for the creation of opportunity 
of independent expression for those musical talents which are 
among their few assets and outlets, and through which they 


School and College 31 


can develop pride, wholesome solidarity, and contribute to 
community spirit. 

“To be concrete, is it not within the possibilities that among 
the musical people of ... are those who might help to de- 
velop a Negro choral society which, if it met a reasonable 
standard of excellence, might be invited to participate in 
the . . . festival; or, at least, to have an annual musical event 
of their own, which would serve to bring to the attention of the 
community the more worthwhile interests and activities of 
the group which is all too apt to come to public attention 
only through its more unfortunate incidents? .. .” 

This letter, addressed to the dean of the music school at the 
university, was by him brought to the attention of the festival 
directors, and he had to report that he “did not find much 
sympathy expressed.” 4 


REGIONAL DIFFERENCES IN ATTITUDES 


One more question is suggested by some of the examples 
told. We have asked ourselves whether it would be better if 
students of very distinct racial minorities were more largely to 
attend colleges of their own. We have not yet considered the 
mixed or separate college education of students who, though 
of the same race and nationality, yet, because they come from 
different parts of the country, have totally different attitudes 
to certain important social questions—including association 
with persons of certain races. 


*Curiously enough, a similar incident in which, however, no college 
was concerned, came up not long ago, in an eastern county where, 
under the auspices of a Recreation Commission, a musical festival was 
to be held. The chorus was made up, for the most part, of church 
choirs, and it soon appeared that they did not desire to have colored 
singers in the chorus. The chorus conductor, conveniently for the cause 
of exclusion, espoused the esthetic theory that “white and colored 
voices don’t blend.” Fortunately, one of the commissioners, unwilling 
to exclude a large and respectable colored population from partici- 
pation in an event sponsored by a public body and paid for out of 
the taxes, was resourceful enough to secure sympathetic assistance 
in the organization of a colored choir which contributed a program of 
spirituals and other numbers to the festival. Incidentally, the appear- 
ance of a fairly large chorus of well-dressed and educated colored 
citizens on the platform did much to enhance the prestige of the 
Negro population in the county. 


ae All Colors 


Would it be better if western and southern and eastern 
white students did not study in other parts of the country? 
_ Or, if they do so, must they be expected to accept all the local 
tradition—“do in Rome as the Romans do”? For examples, 
should northern students in the South adopt the prevailing 
code of conduct toward Negroes? Do college authorities and 
fellow students have any special obligation either to smoothe 
out the differences between their own attitudes and those 
of the students from more distant states, or to change their 
attitudes if they can? - 


Here is a case—which probably many readers will be able 
to match with similar examples—in which educational oppor- 
tunities of that kind were not used: 


In a large mid-western university there are a number of 
colored girls who attend a variety of gymnasium classes. As 
nearly all of these are compulsory, white students have no 
opportunity to protest effectively against this association with 
colored students which, nevertheless, they look upon as much 
closer than association in the class-room. Here, in the freer 
atmosphere of the gym, the colored students found themselves 
humbled in every possible way. In exercises necessitating the 
choice of partners they were always the last to be chosen. 

A white student was overheard to say, “I had to dance with 
one of those colored girls today; I was terribly humiliated 
during the whole period. She didn’t seem to think anything 
about it but kept up a continual babble of talk.” This stu- 
dent, like several others, had been born and reared in the 
South and looked upon this experience from a Southerner’s 
viewpoint. Nothing had been done, apparently, to modify her 
attitude in line with northern ideas. 


CLASSIFICATION OF CONTACTS 


At this point it may be well to pause and see whether we 
cannot do with the experiences we have reviewed in this chap- 
ter something analogous to the procedure adopted at the end 
of the last one. Let us, first, list the different kinds of con- 
tact that have been brought out and then see whether we can 


School and College 33 


divide them into major groups according to the nature of these 
contacts. While in this analysis the reader will give special 
consideration to her pwn experiences, it may be a helpful start 
to list some of the given examples (both in this outline and in © 
Chapter V of And Who Is My Neighbor? several times re- 
ferred to in this chapter). 

Refusal to sit next to a colored girl; 

Jews and other “foreigners” put on a percentage quota; 
Negro excluded from college dormitory ; 

Colored girls choose to live in best dormitory; 

“Shy” Negro student runs away from fellow students, 
afraid of being patronized; 

6. Threatened exclusion from sorority because of going out 
with Oriental student; 

7. Making dates with girls of unpopular racial group; 

8. Going to a dance with a Mexican student (in a com- 
munity where there are many Mexican laborers but few 
educated Mexicans) ; 

9. Competition for honors; 

10. Codperation with colored students in political cause; 

11. Exclusion of “foreigners” from fraternity ; 

12. Social recognition of colored fellow student after 
graduation, in professional and home life. 


Sabi sre dy nae 


What major classifications suggest themselves? 


We might discuss these situations from any or all of the 
following points of view, among others: Contacts on the 
campus and off the campus; contacts with male and with 
female fellow students; situations created by college author- 
ity and situations entered into voluntarily. You may try all 
of these divisions and see whether they show any sharply 
distinguishable types of contact, involving different prin- 
ciples of conduct (as obviously is the case with the division 
on sex lines). Now let us see whether the division of examples 
which we attempted at the end of our last chapter is not prac- 
ticable also with these college experiences. As you will re- 
member, we distinguished— 


34 All Colors 


I. Contacts that involve possibilities of relationships 
which, widespread and unchecked, might lead to race - 
fusion or to the effacement of our cultural heritage; 

II. Contacts that hardly involve such possibilities at all 
but that do involve possible relations which, if generally 
accepted, would lead to social rearrangements as between 
one racial group and another; 

III. Contacts of so casual a character that they involve 
no large social issues of any kind except that of law and 
order and ordinary peaceful conduct as between strangers. 


Do our fifteen or twenty illustrative experiences naturally 
fall within this classification? Would you agree to our rang- 
ing the given dozen situations as follows? 


I. Nos. 6, 8, 12; 
LE Nose 2,03; 
TONS Sa OOO. Lee 


The middle section, in this case, represents in the main those 
situations that are created by college authority; and we might 
well wash our hands of them, were it not for the fact that, 
after all, the rules and policies of educational institutions are 
largely framed to fall in with the presumed wishes of the ma- 
jority of students and their parents. If we should feel that in 
any of these situations we are placed in a false relationship 
toward our Negro or foreign-born fellow students, or that their 
exclusion from the college or any of its privileges is to be con- 
demned, it would clearly be up to us to try to get these rules 
and policies amended. In other words, social rather than in- 
dividual action would usually come into play, although the 
latter may be very effective in extreme cases, as, for example, 
refusal to profit from some special privilege that we regard as 
manifestly unfair to other students. 

In the first group we shall probably again have difficulties 
in arriving at clear-cut rules of conduct for ourselves because 

* Don’t regard this division as authoritative but follow your own judg- 
ment here and in other places where classification of incidents or rang- 


ing of suggested activities in the order of their respective importance 
is called for. 


School and College 35 


we are not sure enough of the results to which social intimacy 
between students of both sexes and of different races might 
lead and whether we would approve or disapprove of them. 
But again, as in our earlier dealing with this kind of situation, 
we shall have to consider also whether we can avoid all choice 
of action even though we are as yet open-minded, and whether 
we cannot decide on ways of conduct, either on the side of 
caution or on that of courage, as more nearly corresponding 
to our sense of what is right while we are struggling with the 
larger issues. 

A majority of the situations seem to fall into the last group, 
where clearly no great principles are involved, but where our 
choice of conduct will turn largely upon an ordinary sense of 
fairness, decency and courtesy as between fellow students. 
But do not take anyone’s word for it; hidden in what seems 
an obvious case for mutual forbearance, even for friendly mu- 
tual helpfulness, you may possibly discover the beginning 
of a more “dangerous” social relationship—‘‘dangerous”’ either 
because apt to lead to race fusion, or to confusion of our cul- 
tural standards or, from an opposite point of view, because 
it introduces a discrimination on racial grounds where none 
was recognized before. It may be dangerous also in the sense 
of involving in principle a complete readjustment of social 
groups (with doubtful consequences) and not merely an ad- 


* As has been said in the last chapter, many of the problems in this 
group—provided we assume a desire to act fairly and considerately 
toward others—often represent little more than questions of etiquette. 
Books on etiquette are not taken too seriously by most of us—and 
rightly so, since what we are after is not behavior which is merely 
“correct” according to prevailing social codes but behavior that we 
can defend also on the highest ethical grounds. Nevertheless, every 
now and then an awkward situation, or one charged with possibility 
of friction, can be turned to good account for harmonious relation- 
ships by a person who is sure of herself and resourceful in her con- 
siderateness. Thus, while there is only one reference to race relations, 
and that a minor one, in a new book on Etiquette at College (by 
Nellie Ballou; Handy Book Corporation, Harrisburg, 1925, 130 pp. 
Price $2.00), there are several pieces of good advice which may with 
special benefit be applied to student behavior toward fellow students 
of other racial or national groups than their own. (See, for example, 
pp. 42, 72, 74, 90-92.) 


36 All Colors 


justment between individual fellow students. Many situa- 
tions like the following will come to mind; 


The line was forming preparatory to marching to chapel for 
the class day exercises. A Negro student was graduating that 
year. The line formed in a column of twos. When it reached 
the chapel, it was discovered that the colored boy had marched 
at the end of the line, alone. When the exercises were over 
and the line was reformed, one of the most active and popular 
girls in the class held back and marched out with the Negro 
at the end of the line. 


Was this an occasion for practicing ordinary courtesy, or 
was there expressed in the action of the girl a deep-seated 
conviction for which she was willing to make a sacrifice? 


At the end of the previous chapter (p. 14) we found that we 
cannot always defer action on problems concerning which we 
have a divided mind because we do not know the more remote 
consequences of the possible lines of action. We therefore 
decided that, pending such a decision, we must often deal with 
them temporarily in one of three ways: conservatively, experi- 
mentally, or “diplomatically.” In other words, while keeping 
an open mind, we may decide, for the present, to err on the 
safe side by acting in line with convention; or we may prefer 
to err in the search for a new adjustment even though it may 
not be the conventional thing to do; or, again, we may try to 
avoid facing the issue directly and in one way or other “get 
around it” for the time being. 


SociaL ACTION 


Exactly the same kind of temporary decision as regards per- 
sonal conduct is possible where we face problems of the second 
category—problems about which, we feel, it is impracticable 
for us to do anything very effective as individuals but where 
the kind of social action of which we would approve does not 
seem immediately practicable. Here also we may, while set- 
ting the wheels of change going, in the meantime act either 
conservatively or experimentally or in such a way as to avoid 


School and College 37 


facing the issue squarely. Here, more especially, we have 
the opportunity of trying out methods that are creative in 
that they attempt to provide for others as well as for ourselves 
a process of learning before definite choices are made and 
binding declarations of conviction are registered. 

An example of this choice between several possible forms of 
action and inaction may make the point clearer: 


A Chinese student, popular with her fellow-students, was 
bid by the local chapter of a national fraternity. She was 
initiated just before having to return to China. Later that 
summer the biennial national convention of the fraternity 
took place. This fraternity was made up largely of western 
chapters, and when it became known that a Chinese member 
had been initiated by one of the eastern chapters, a strong 
opposition developed, and there was a demand that her pin 
be withdrawn and her membership in the convention be can- 
celed. ) 

What were the representatives of the Chinese member’s 
local chapter to do? With a head-on collision they would un- 
doubtedly have lost out. Moreover, a decision on this case 
would have made it exceedingly difficult to bring the issue up 
again at some other time. So they temporized. They said, 
rejection of the Chinese girl would lead to the resignation of 
their strongest members and alumni from the fraternity. 
Moreover, the Chinese student in question, they said, had 
taken no part in the councils of the chapter because of her 
absence and was ill since her return so that it would be par- 
ticularly ungracious to act upon the proposal to cancel her 
membership now. The report adds that the matter has come 
up for discussion at other meetings of the fraternity, but that 
no action has ever been taken deciding the matter one way or 
the other. 


However, while on problems of the first type we had good 
reason for temporizing, we do know, concerning those of the 
second type, what we want—at least in rough outlines. There- 
fore, while we may act upon them for the time being as indi- 
viduals, we shall not be satisfied unless we also start some- 
thing in the way of social engineering. Hence, it may be well 
at this point to look at some of the possibilities of social action 


38 All Colors 


—the more so since we have also left on our hands certain 
problems of the first category which, while awaiting a decision, 
may suggest not only possibilities of helpful individual con- 
duct but also possibilities of social action. For example, with- 
out committing myself as regards my attitude toward Oriental 
men students, I can decide—in fact I am often forced to 
make a decision—to behave toward them individually thus 
and thus; and I can also decide to propose such and such 
rules as regards their admission to the literary society, or to 
petition the college authorities for such and such action con- 
cerning their sharing or not sharing certain privileges which 
I am enjoying. 


What, then, are our choices of action on the level of 
social engineering? 


Although you can probably think of others, there seem to be 
two main types of action: one is organization of social forces, 
the other is education of social opinion. Before we consider 
examples, let us see whether we can further subdivide these 
two main choices. Under each heading we may, perhaps, 
recognize four ways of going about it, or rather four possible 
social groups within which or upon which we may desire to 
act: (1) the small, intimate group—as for instance an inter- 
racial discussion group—(2) the larger organization or insti- 
tution of which it is a part (the college, the school, the re- 
ligious association, the church, etc.), (3) some existing agency, 
national or local (a social settlement or an Americanization 
agency), (4) and some new group or organization that we may 
help to start for the specific purpose in mind. 

Thus, for our purpose of getting something done, other than 
on the level of individual behavior, we have marked out, for 
the time being, eight possible lines of action (several of which 
will often be embodied in the same program): 


A. Organize for action: 


1. within the small group; 
2. within the larger organization or institution of 
which it is part; 


School and College 39 


3. by offering our services to a_ specializing 
agency ; 
4. by creating a new organization or agency. 


B. Educate for action: ? 


5. within the small group; 

6. within the larger organization or institution 
of which it is part; 

7. by offering our services to a specializing 
agency; 

8. by creating a new organization or agency. 


We will now list a number of possibilities of social action on 
problems in race relations, as they appear on the campus, and 
see how they range themselves under the heads of this schedule. 
(Each reader is asked to add to the list and to mark each item 
with the number and letter of the class to which it seems to 
belong.) 


A MEDLEY OF SUGGESTIONS FOR ACTION 


Make race relations the subject of a literary society paper. 

Demand race relations (or a specific campus aspect of them) 
as a topic for an inter-collegiate debate or, better, joint dis- 
cussion. 

Make a “case” that has actually happened, involving differ- 
ent philosophies of race relations, the topic of your paper in 
an oratorical contest. 

Take more seriously the selection of the editorial board for 
the college paper. 

Consider race attitudes in the selection of candidates and 
in the voting for college offices. 

Get the rules of your sorority amended. 

Start a new sorority. 

Start a Cosmopolitan Club. 

Reorganize the Cosmopolitan Club. 

Let the college authorities know, through deputations of 
those concerned, of the trend of student opinion on existing 
college policies and rules involving racial discriminations. 

Request a more scientific definition of “Negro” in college 


*For an important suggestion concerning the education of social 
opinion see footnote 1 on p. 82. 


40 All Colors 


rules affecting that race; also, where necessary, of other 
racial and national groups. 

Request a more scientific method for ascertaining student 
opinion where college policy is supposed to be based upon it. 

Ask the college authorities to defend rulings of doubtful 
value concerning racial privileges or exclusions in public de- 
bate, or at least to explain them at Chapel. 

Contrive to secure leaders of foreign-born groups and racial 
minorities for events on the programs of college societies. 

Organize field studies of foreign-born neighborhoods. 

Request inclusion of books that you have found useful in 
the college library. 

Organize exchanges of visits between student groups and 
groups of students in other institutions (Negro colleges, Jew- 
ish educational alliances, etc.). 

Organize English classes for foreign-born women. 

Assist Americanization societies in their educational work 
among the foreign-born. 

‘ Seat in social settlement work in foreign-born neighbor- 
oods. 

Promote exchanges of choirs between your church and some 
colored church. 

Offer your services for Sunday school work in a mission 
among the foreign-born. 

Organize a college branch of some national inter-racial 
agency. 

Request that the problem of race relations be made promi- 
nent in the program of the Sociological Club of the college. 

Instruct organizers of student conferences to make sure in 
their arrangements that colored or Oriental students are not 
discriminated against in the social amenities connected with 
the undertaking. 

Organize exchanges of home visits between students with 
backgrounds of different racial cultures. 

Write for the local newspapers accounts of inter-racial ac- 
tivities. 

Boycott restaurants near the campus that discriminate 
against colored or Oriental students. 

Investigate certain college activities as to their racial poli- 
cies (employment service, direct employment of students, 
alleged discriminations in individual cases). 


School and College 41 


Influence alumni to provide employment for students or 
graduates of groups that have difficulty in securing suitable 
positions because of their race or nationality. 

Raise money for extra-mural inter-racial activities (such 
as a neighborhood house, an Urban League, or the like). 

Organize an inter-racial summer conference. 

Secure inclusion of race relations as a topic at student con- 
ferences. 


Well, these suggestions probably will do for the time being. 
Yet they are quite at random, with no attempt at giving 
them in order; and none of them may meet your particular 
difficulties. So, before you leave the subject, try to match 
them, if you can, with practical suggestions of your own. Of 
course, if you mean business, you will now want to select from 
these types of activity those that seem most feasible and 
then proceed to get busy about them. But unless you are 
already tired of study, you will do well not to let these prac- 
tical matters interrupt your course, and instead will hold up 
your decision upon them until you have looked at them also 
in the light of their larger implications.? 

There is just one more matter of interest, however, that 
arises from any such list of possible activities. We have 
already seen that there is only a hazy dividing line between 
the problems that we have transferred from the first to the 
second class—from deferred action until we have thoroughly 
come to understand the ultimate issues involved to immediate 
action in the field of social engineering. We now find that 
the dividing line between the problems that call for social 
action and those that call for individual action is equally faint. 
Several of the suggestions made are for activities which will 
be the more effective the more persons take part in them but 
which are also to some extent open to individuals. On the 

*Since many of the activities suggested will be of an inter-racial 
character, it is important to pay some attention to the form of organi- 
zation, how groups are to be constituted, etc. Useful hints on this 
matter will be found in Chapter IV of Toward Inter-racial Codpera- 
tion, proceedings of a national inter-racial conference. The publishers 


are The Commission on the Church and Race Relations of the Fed- 
eral Council of Churches, New York, 1926. (Price, $1.25.) 


42 All Colors 


other hand, some of the actions or changes of conduct to which 
an individual may commit herself will acquire social signifi-. 
cance from the effectiveness of the example set and the 
inducement of others to follow itt. The example of an in- 
quiring or experimental attitude toward the situation in itself 
may have considerable educational significance even where 
the nature of the particular choice of action does not com- 
mend itself to others. 

This chapter is already over-long. We therefore relegate 
to the appendix four suggestions that come to us from actual 
experience: the first, a report of the second year’s work of the 
inter-racial committee of a middle-western university (Ap- 
pendix C I, p. 140); the second a unique form of educational 
field work, now in its third year, the Reconciliation Trips of 
New York City (II, p. 142); the third, an account of the 
way in which a religious institution applied to its program 
an educationally creative attitude (III, p. 146); the fourth, 
a form of inter-racial association in which a common interest 
is the bridge for better mutual understanding (IV, p. 150). 


*Make a list, if you can, of individual efforts toward inter-racial 
harmony that you have heard about and that, you think, might with 
advantage be imitated by others. 

Set down also those social experiments with a similar aim that seem 
to ay to fit those concrete difficulties with which you are most con- 
cerned. 


CHAPTER III 
Shop and Office 


After school comes work. Unless we are unusually fortu- 
nate, we now can no longer choose our associates altogether 
from the point of view of their congeniality. In fact, we must 
be prepared now and again to put up with a pill of a work- 
mate and, shall we say, a rough diamond of a boss. We 
cannot change our job every time the harsh voice of a fellow 
worker grates on us or because the woman just above us is 
“no class.” Of course, we shall not take a job if we can 
sniff in the atmosphere that we shall probably not like ‘the 
human contacts it entails. And if subsequently we discover 
something very wrong that we have missed when we were 
applying for a position, we can always take our leave. 

But usually someone is concerned in seeing to it that the 
personal relations in the office, shop or laboratory—or where- 
ever we may work—shall not be too unpleasant; because, if 
they are, no one will do his or her best work. So the man or 
the woman who is employing you assumes at the start that you 
will have certain preferences in the matter of your associates 
and makes a guess at what those preferences are likely to be. 
Here are some of the results: 


PREFERENCES AND DISCRIMINATION 


‘We never take Italians if we can help it,” said a cloak and 
suit manufacturer. “They make trouble with the other work- 
ers.” Another in the same branch of business said, “‘I’ll take 
anybody who can do my work for me. I don’t care what 
language they speak.” Andathird: “Sure, I employ Italians, 
but not one who comes bare-headed or with a shawl over her 
head.” Here are three different standards—one takes into 

43 


44 All Colors 


account the feelings of the persons already in his employment; 
the second considers only personal efficiency at the job; the 
third selects those who socially come up to the standard of the 
other workers.* 

Of course the feelings of their present personnel are only 
one of the influences that determine employers to exclude this 
or that racial group from employment. For example: 


Mary Smith, a colored college graduate, had for some time 
been employed in the auditing department of a large concern 
—and at one time had been assured by the secretary of the 
firm that she would soon be promoted because of the firm’s 
appreciation for her work—when the president under whom 
she had been appointed died. His successor, as soon as he 
came into office, insisted upon the colored girl’s dismissal. 
The head of the audit department tried to convince him that 
the firm would save money by having in that department a 
person of tried competency and accuracy. He replied that 
he would rather lose money than have a colored girl in his 
employment. Incidentally, as is often the case, the concern 
in which this took place is one that does a considerable 


business with colored people. 


Several years ago, the post office in a California city, 
according to its custom, had advertised that the Civil Service 
examinations for employees in the office would be held at a 
certain time. Two colored girls passed with the highest marks 
for the particular positions that were vacant. They were 
called into the office and told by the postmaster, with expres- 
sions of profound regret, that they must step aside and allow 
white women to take the positions although they had every 
right to them. He told them that if they insisted on their 
right, every white woman would leave the employment of the 
post office; it would be due to their intrusion if the whole 
post office personnel (this was in a large city) got disorganized. 
He admitted, when asked, that there were a number of colored 
mail carriers in the city, but he said that had nothing to do 
with it, the case was entirely different. He put it up to the 
girls to say how, in view of the situation, he could possibly act 
differently. And, of course, they withdrew their application. 


* Expressions of employers’ opinion quoted from Italian Women in 
Industry, by Louise C. Odencrantz, Russell Sage Foundation, 1919, p. 63. 


a 


Shop and Office A5 


Well, what do you think? Ought these colored girls to have 
msisted upon their legal right under the civil service law? 
Should the postmaster have obeyed the law without weighing 
the possible consequences? Could the danger of friction and 
wholesale flight of white girls have been prevented by explain- 
ung to them the situation and appealing to their patriotism? * 


Does or does not every occasion when colored applicants 
withdraw because of such hostility make it more difficult 
for colored people to enter occupations previously closed 
to them? 


What other ways were open to the postmaster in this 
case to solve his problem without racial injustice? Should he 
have taken more definite steps to ascertain the existing atti- 
tudes among his white employees? 


An investigation of colored women in industry in New York 
a few a_few years ago revealed these facts: 


About half of the employers” ‘claimed that their white 
workers had no objection to the colored women, that they 
were either cordial or entirely indifferent toward them. Of 
the other half, some said their white workers objected when 
the colored workers were first hired, but felt no prejudice 
now. Other white workers preferred to have the two groups 
segregated. Still others were willing to let the colored do 
unskilled work but refused to allow them on skilled processes. 
On the other hand, however, 78 per cent of the 175 colored 


women questioned reported cordial relations with their cO-4 


a eietiond NRA EMIT og 


/ workers. In évéery instance where personal or social hostility . 


had been evident, piece work had prevailed and work was a 4 
very plentiful at the time. All of the 175 colored women inter- | 
viewed expressed a desire to be on friendly terms with the ne 


he workers. ip ae 


bE PY orn AERA LE AC To ea MATS MRA CN eA RE OETA MR dno PR ALE meses 


naecon the same a a bit oetine that it is a ry ie 
a question of “either—or,” but that different methods of man- 
agement may make for anton or harmony between workers 
of different races: 


*See Introduction, p. vi, for the reason why some questions are 
printed in italics and others in bold type. 


46 All Colors 


An interesting development occurred in a shop making 
dresses. There were two long tables of finishers, one of. 
white and the other of colored; and each was presided over 
by a forewoman and examiner of their own color. When 
colored workers were first taken on, a year ago, they were 
placed with the white finishers under a white examiner and 
forewoman. So much friction resulted that the present 
arrangement was made. The superintendent tells proudly what 
wonders the change has worked. Complaints have been re- 
duced to a minimum, and the efficiency of both tables has been 
materially increased. That a group which has always suffered 
from racial discrimination feels more comfortable and is better 
assured of fair play with supervisors of its own color is easily 
understood.* 


But, someone may say, sometimes the number of workers 
of one racial group is not large enough to permit such separa- 
tion. What, for example, could be done where a majority are 
colored to make it possible for white girls to work in that 
shop? 


As it happens, two examples of this condition can be quoted. 
The first is from a report of the Consumers’ League of Eastern 
Pennsylvania: 


Not only are colored and white working side by side, but 
in a small candy factory white girls were found working 
under the direction of a colored forelady. The manager said 
the white girls rather objected at first until he explained that 
she was the only one who knew all the processes and it was 
necessary to have someone who could teach the others. No 
trouble was experienced after that. 


The other example comes from a report on a tobacco factory 
in Ohio: 


At the close of each day, as the women finish their own 
supply of stock, they help those near them who have not com- 
pleted their task. The colored women sit down with the 
white, foreign-born women and help to shorten the working 


*See Negro Women in Industry. Bulletin No. 20, Women’s Bureau, 
U. 8. Department of Labor, 1922. 


Shop and Office 47 


day of the slower workers. Although the colored women and 
the white women show this coéperative spirit in regard to their 
work, each white woman, when approached by a white inter- 
viewer, displayed some feeling of superiority towards the 
colored workers and made it clear that she felt the position in 
which she was working as beneath her dignity. 


Do you think that, possibly, some employers are making 
too much of the disinclination of white women to work 
with colored ones? That, though there may be dissatis- 
faction at first, they will get accustomed to it? 


Moreover, are employers equally solicitous about the feelings 
of their white employees in this matter when they know they 
can make money out of the employment of girls of one of the 
despised racial groups? 


Look at some of these examples: 


Wace DISCRIMINATIONS 


In a certain middle-western city two women are employed 
by a social agency for identically the same work. One of 
them has had no previous training. The other, after gradu- 
ating from college, has been trained for social work at a 
special training school; it is she who does most of the work. 
Yet the former worker gets $125 a month and the latter only 
be : ye untrained woman is white and the trained woman 
colored. 


The manager of a large lithographing establishment that 
was greatly in need of labor stated that the initial wage was 
$10 a week. But the colored girls who applied for positions 
there were offered $7. When the employer was questioned 
concerning the discrepancy in wages he stated that that was 
the wage paid to white girls and he really was not aware of 
the amount paid to colored girls, although in one department 
they were doing the same work. He said he was ready to 
assure any colored girl that her wages would be rapidly in- 
creased if she showed ‘a willingness to stay. And yet one of 
his colored girls interviewed started at $7 and did not receive 
a raise until three months later, and then she had to ask for 


48 All Colors 


it; another worked five months before her wage was increased 
to $9. A white girl who started at $10 was given a raise of $1 
after two weeks.? 


But this is only one form, the most direct, of discriminating 
in the wages paid to white and to colored women. To quote 
again the New York report: 


Employers have sometimes segregated the colored workers, 
keeping the wage scale of the colored departments lower than 
that of similar departments made up of white workers... . 
Another method has been to deny the colored the opportunity 
of competing in piece work, as in the case of the colored pres- 
sers in the needle trades who were paid $10 a week on a time 
rate basis, while the white pressers averaged $12 a week at 
piece work. 


And here is an ingenious explanation given for this last type 
of discrepancy—one that brings up further questions: 


The refusal to grant a piece-rate to colored women is made 
on two grounds. First, that colored women could not earn as 
much as they are now earning on a time rate and would leave 
dissatisfied. Second, that colored women work more slowly 
and resent “speeding up” and “pace setters.” 


RELATIVE EFFICIENCY 


That leads us to consider for a moment the question of 
relative efficiency. And it matters little whether we take our 
examples from industrial practice or from office routine—the 
principle is the same. Only, it is worth noting that one con- 
stant complaint of employers about colored women workers is 
that they leave on the slightest cause. That this may have 
something to do with the low wage paid them and their sense 
of the injustice when they compare their wage-scale with that 
of white women, somehow often escapes the attention of em- 
ployers. For example: 


There is not much doubt that colored women, in most cases, 
represent “cheap” labor. Whenever they are well-paid, they 


*Colored Women as Industrial Workers in Philadelphia. Pamphlet. 
Consumers’ League of Philadelphia. 


Shop and Office 49 


are cheerful and dependable; when working for less than a 
living wage, they are restless and unreliable. In a certain 
factory in which the management had declared their colored 
girls unreliable, it was found that if a girl ever reached the 
earning power of $15 per week, she usually became a satis- 
factory worker.' 


But do colored and white women differ essentially in 
capacity for work? Is there a difference in this regard 
as between women of different immigrant groups—sufh- 
cient to justify a different scale of remuneration? 


The evidence is contradictory. We read, for example: 


An official of the State of Pennsylvania wrote that the 
Russian Jews “evidently prefer filth to cleanliness,’ while 
another investigator of the problem concluded that the “fac- 
tory system with its discipline and regular hours” was “dis- 
tasteful to the Jew’s individualism” and that the Jewish 
worker preferred “the sweat-shop with its going and coming.” ? 


The bias involved in such explanations is evident. Sweat- 
ing in the United States existed in the men’s clothing trades 
long before the coming of Jewish and Italian immigrants. It 
has existed in various industries in other countries. . . . The 
Jewish, and later also the Italian, garment workers worked 
in sweat-shops because they had no other entry into American 
industry.® 


There is much Italian talent which Americans do not 
recognize as yet. The best workers at Tiffany’s are Italians. 
The best designers among garment workers are Italians. I 
do not understand why Italians have been treated in this 
country as they have been. I go to a store, and they say 
to me, “Are you French?” I say, “No.” They say, “Span- 
ish?” “No; I am Italian.” And then there is immediate 
coldness and contempt.* 


*The Negro in Chicago Industries. William L. Evans, Opportunity, 
February, 1923. 

*John R. Commons, Races and Immigrants. Macmillan Co., p. 133, 
quoted in following paragraph. 

*Louis Levine, The Women’s Garment Workers. B. W. Huebsch, 
Inc., 1924, p. 22. 

*From an interview with Signora de Blasio, Italian Industrial School. 


50 All Colors 


Perhaps the conditions under which newcomers in any large © 
industry are employed are such that a fair comparison of 
their efficiency with that of the older established workers is 
not possible. This seems to be indicated by such statements 
as the following from a bulletin of the U. S. Department of 
Labor: 


So far as the situation may be regarded as peculiar to the 
Negro woman, it may be said that she has been accepted, 
in the main, as an experiment. Her admittance to a given 
occupation or plant has been conditioned upon no other work- 
ers being available, and her continuance frequently hinged 
upon the same. She was usually given the less desirable jobs. 
The Negro woman worker, being new to industry, has to learn 
the lessons of routine and regularity. The attitude of the 
employer and of the other workers toward women workers 
was one of uncertainty.* 


One significant accomplishment was the placing of sixty 
colored girls in a knitting mill in a type of work in which 
colored girls had not previously been employed. In less than 
two months, the superintendent reported that the girls had 
given entire satisfaction and that the company was planning 
further extension of the employment of colored girls in their 
mills.? 


In studying the two groups of workers, white and colored, 
I do not find there is any difference that can be judged purely 
on racial grounds as to honesty or intelligent work or capacity 
for work or attitudes of laborer to employer. The colored 
workers only need more patience as to factory education at 
first, and they respond. (From a Chicago report.) 


Are those who compare Negro and white workers apt to 
forget that many of the Negro workers are likely to be new 
to the particular conditions under which the work is carried 





New York, quoted in Old World Traits Transplanted, by Robert E. 
Park and Herbert A. Miller. Harper & Brothers, 1921, p. 51. 

* The Basis of Racial Adjustment, by T. J. Woofter, Jr. Ginn & Co., 
1925, p. 103. 

*A Note on Negro Industrial Problems. Gordon H. Simpson. 
Opportunity, June, 1924. 


Shop and Office 51 


on—whether in shop or office—so that really they are in the 
same position as foreign-born workers who, likewise, need 
training before they become fully qualified for a job which an 
American-born white girl may be able to pick up in a jiffy? 


In PROFESSIONAL WorK 


In professional services, discrepancies between the salaries 
paid white and colored or native and immigrant women work- 
ers are sometimes explained by differences in their training. 
This argument was advanced recently by a writer in The 
Public Health Nurse. Still another explanation, in reply to 
it, was given in the same Journal (for May, 1924) by a south- 
ern director of public health nursing who maintains that in 
her state, Virginia, the standards of colored nurses are the 
same as those of white ones, but defends the lower wages paid 
them by the difference in living costs. Her reasoning is based 
on the assumption that the state or the city as an employer 
has a right—even a duty in fairness to the white workers— 
to pay a lesser salary to colored employees who, because of the 
existing law and the state of public opinion, are prevented 
from enjoying the same standards of living as those of the 
dominant race. 


While on this subject of nursing, it is interesting to note 
that the head of one of the largest visiting nurse services 
speaks appreciatively of the abilities of the colored nurses on 
the staff but adds, “We have not yet been able to discover 
much executive ability among them, so that very few of them 


* An investigation recently carried out by the Hospital Library and 
Service Bureau showed that only one in thirty of accredited schools 
of nursing admit colored students, and less than one out of every 
twenty-five hospitals use colored graduate nurses. Only a minority of 
public health services employ colored health visitors—this in spite of 
the fact that where colored nurses are employed the demand for them 
usually increases. A writer in the American Journal of Nursing (for 
June, 1923) says: “Colored women make excellent nurses. To their 
natural gifts of tact and skillful handling are added soft, melodious 
voices, sympathetic natures, and idealism. The Negro nurses of the 
country formed a national association in 1908, which is a vital force 
for their professional progress. ‘These women have all the usual 
problems of the nurse to meet, with an additional one, the cruel 
handicap of race prejudice.” 


| 


52 All Colors 


fill executive positions.” A colored nurse who shows promise - 
of executive ability is given every encouragement and assist- 
ance in the development of her capabilities. Visiting nurse 
service also provides a good opportunity for observing the 
relations between professional white and colored fellow work- 
ers and the attitude of white and colored clients toward them. 


The experience in this respect of the Henry Street Settle- 
ment in New York, with a staff of about 250 nurses covering 
the whole city, is probably not exceptional. There are sixteen 
stations, one of which is staffed with colored nurses entirely, 
serving almost 100 per cent colored population. In this center 
the assistant supervisor is a colored nurse. Two other stations 
have a small proportion of colored nurses who generally serve 
colored families in their respective districts, though occa- 
sionally white nurses carry colored patients and colored nurses 
white patients, in their respective districts. There is some 
objection from the colored people to having white nurses and 
some from the white people, who object to colored nurses. 
There is very little difference in this respect and hardly ever 
is there real friction. No nurse is accepted for this work who 
is not a high-school graduate and a graduate nurse registered 
in New York State. Students are accepted for post-graduate 
and undergraduate experience. All nurses are on the same 
salary basis. A colored nurse was one of the first nurses to 
receive the special pin for ten years of efficient service. 

Incidentally what is said here about white and colored 
nurses is also true of the alternate services between native and 
foreign-born nurses of whom there are many because, with 
an aim which is primarily educational, it is important that 
there should be complete understanding of the instructions 
given. Some of the American-born nurses speak a number of 
foreign languages, while, of course, all the foreign-born nurses 
also speak English—so that there is not merely professional 
cooperation, occasionally re-inforced by impressive ceremonies, 
but much friendship across national and racial lines which 
expresses itself in pleasant personal relations and cheerful 
parties. 


In so far as Negro professional workers are paid by a clien- 
tele whose average income is very low, obviously their re- 


Shop and Office 53 


muneration will tend to be lower than that of white workers 
of similar skill. And this is the case not only where they are 
paid directly in fees but also where the institutions with which 
they are connected are maintained by Negro support. We 
thus expect that the salaries paid at a Negro hospital or Negro 
college to Negro workers will at best be on the lowest levels 
of those paid at similar private institutions sponsored by white 
patrons. A very different situation, however, exists where pub- 
lic services, maintained from taxes to which all residents, 
irrespective of race, contribute according to their equal liability 
under the law, discriminate against colored professional work- 
ers. This is the normal situation both in the public health 
services of the country and in public education. W. D. 
Weatherford shows that even in states where the salaries paid 
white teachers are totally inadequate, those of colored teachers 
are still lower: 


The average annual teachers’ salaries for white and colored 
and for male and female in Alabama is as follows: White 
male $408, Negro male $186, white female $391, Negro female 
$157. In North Carolina in 1920 the total expenditure for 
teachers’ salaries for rural schools was for white teachers 
$4,564,907, for Negro $819,372, or considerably less than one 
fifth for Negro teachers, although the white school population 
is only a little more than twice as large as the colored. In 
1919 the average annual salary for white teachers in North 
Carolina was $296.80, that for colored was $157.15, the colored 
teacher receiving just a little more than half what the white 
teacher received. 


The following situation is said not to be exceptional: 


In Norfolk, Va., the minimum salary of any white teacher 
in the public schools is $1,000 a year. In the same city the 
maximum salary of any Negro teacher in the elementary 
schools is $1,000 a year. Whatever may be the Negro’s train- 
ing, efficiency or acquired ability, and no matter how long he 
remains in the system, his economic status ends where the 


*The Negro from Africa to America, George H. Doran Co., 1924, 
p. 376. Price $5.00. 


54 All Colors 


white teacher’s, who may be very much less efficient, economic ~ 
status begins.? 


Unfortunately, neither Weatherford nor Thomas Jackson 
Woofter, Jr., dealing with the same theme more recently,? 
shows how the northern states compare with the southern in 
this matter. It is, however, safe to say that while the differ- 
ence between the salaries paid white and colored teachers may 
be less striking in the North, it exists nevertheless—if only 
through non-promotion of colored teachers to positions of 
added responsibility. 


For instance, in some northern cities the policy obtains 
never to advance colored teachers from elementary to high 
schools or to appoint them for high-school positions, however 
well qualified they may be. The following case is typical: 


Jane Meade left home to attend a college of high standing 
so that she might become a high school teacher in her com- 
munity. She received her diploma, standing high in all studies 
and receiving honors in Latin. On her return home, she 
passed the requirements of both the state and the city board. 
Yet when, after some time of waiting, she asked the superin- 
tendent of schools why she did not receive an appointment, he 
told her that he would under no circumstances appoint her a 
high-school teacher. 


Again, the question will be raised whether the lower earnings 
of Negro teachers and the refusal to assign higher positions 
to them are not due, in part at least, to their lesser ability. 
This, however, only brings us to an even more palpable dis- 
crimination, namely, in the allocation of subsidies for teacher- 
training given by the federal government under the Smith- 
Hughes Act of 1917—with the provision that for every dollar 
of federal tax-money spent, the state or local school authority 
must add another dollar. In practice, law and constitution 
notwithstanding, this contribution from the federal treasury 


* Jesse O. Thomas, in Opportunity for February, 1926, p. 49. 
*The Basis of Racial Adjustment, Ginn & Co., 1925, p. 178. Price, 
$1.40. 


Shop and Office 55 


is expended largely upon the support of training schools from 
which colored students are excluded. 


How Negro teachers may be handicapped by being excluded 
from opportunities of training has recently been ventilated in 
correspondence concerning non-admission of colored teachers to 
an extension course at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. 
Under an arrangement with the school authorities of Wilming- 
ton, Delaware, the university offered a special extension course 
to the teachers of that city. Hearing that the university would 
not receive colored graduate students, D. A. Ward, superin- 
tendent of the Wilmington schools, called together the twenty- 
four colored teachers who had registered for the course and 
advised them to withdraw their application. This they in- 
dignantly refused to do. Subsequently, at a meeting of the 
thirty school principals of Wilmington—24 white and 6 colored 
—it was unanimously decided to reject the Johns Hopkins 
course on behalf of the whole teaching force of the city. 

President Frank J. Goodnow, of the university, in reply to 
an inquiry, stated: ‘We have felt that inasmuch as we are 
chartered by the State of Maryland and receive a considerable 
grant from the State, we should conform to the educational 
policy of the State with regard to the admission into the 
University of colored students. The policy of the State is the 
segregation of the races in all the schools of the State, includ- 
ing training schools for teachers.” 


Does your state or your college have a similar policy? 
Are the training facilities offered white and colored students 
of equal value? What other public policies—defintely in- 
corporated in laws or implied in actual practice and conven- 
teon—are there which may be held to handicap some groups 
in the attainment of professional skill and reputation? Are 
these policies arbitrary or part of a race philosophy of govern- 
ment? Do they correspond to present-day sentiments, or are 
they survivals from a period in which circumstances may have 
justified such policies? What motives lie back of them? Fear 


of competition? Fear of social consequences that are un- 
desired? 


*See The Crisis, January, 1926, p. 145. 


56 All Colors 


Are such policies based on the assumption of essential 
inequality between the races? 


Have you observed any inherent differences between pro- 
fesstonal workers of different races—so far as the exercise of 
thew profession 1s concerned? 


DIFFERENCES IN MorAau STANDARDS 


But, someone will observe, are not the moral standards 
different? 


Is it fair to expose any girls to contacts with others 
whose ideas as regards honesty, fairness, generosity, purity, 
may be on a much lower level? 


The Negro woman does not maintain any moral standard 
which may be assigned chiefly to qualities of race, any more 
than a white woman does. Yet she has been singled out and 
advertised as having lower sex standards. . . . Sex irregular- 
ities are not a matter of race, but of socio-economic conditions. 
Research shows that most of the African tribes from which the 
Negro sprang have strict codes for sex relations. There is no 
proof of inherent weakness in the ethnic group. 

Gradually overcoming the habitual limits imposed upon her 
by slave masters, she increasingly seeks legal sanction for the 
consummation and dissolution of sex contracts. Contrary to 
popular belief, illegitimacy among Negroes is cause for shame 
and grief.+ 

An employer who had colored and white girls working to- 
gether with no trouble found it advisable to have separate 
dressing rooms “because,” he said, “if anything is missing the 
white girls are certain to blame it on the colored girls.’” 


* Elise Johnson McDougald in The Survey for March 1, 1925, p. 691. 
The article of this colored woman, who is assistant school principal in 
New York City, entitled “The Double Task: The Struggle of Negro 
Women for Sex and Race Emancipation,” contains much valuable infor- 
mation on the Negro professional woman. It is reprinted in The New 
Af oy edited by Alain Locke. Albert and Charles Boni, 1925. Price, 

* Colored Women as Industrial Workers in Philadelphia. Consumers’ 
League, Philadelphia. 


Shop and Office 57 


From time to time we have placed a small group of colored 
girls to work along with white girls, and never has there been 
any trouble or objection. On some floors they sew side by side 
and get along nicely. 

We had in our factory last year a student worker under the 
guardianship of the Y.W.C.A., one of a group of students 
who sought first-hand experience. She worked on a power 
sewing-machine with the colored girls on her shift for seven 
weeks. The colored girls were ignorant of her motives and, 
as I was very much interested in the outcome, I was careful to 
keep it a secret. I did not let even the management know about 
this experiment until the last day, and then I took her all 
through the factory and introduced her. She was able to mix 
freely with the girls, and I was pleased to find this comment 
in her report: 

“When I went to work among the colored girls I expected to 
find a low moral standard, but much to my surprise this was 
not so. I did not hear any swearing or low conversation. The 
girls were cheerful about their work and very helpful to each 
other. I did not feel at all strange among them as I had 
expected and found no more difference than I would in any 
other different social scale.” 

I believe that the moral tone of any factory will improve 
if interest is taken in the conditions that tend to lead to im- 
provement and by personal supervision of the right sort. 
Standards of good conduct can be maintained as well as im- 
provement in business efficiency. (From a report by a per- 
sonnel officer in a plant employing white and colored women.) 


Of course, this is no conclusive evidence. Like other illus- 
trative material in this outline it merely points in a direction 
that should be further explored. 


What reasons have you for thinking that the conditions 
under which women of different races and nationalities are 
employed have (or do not have) a bearing upon differences in 
personal qualities and standards? 


Can the moral standards of individuals be assumed to 
be those generally associated with their group? What 
constitutes their group? 


58 All Colors 


Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that you are work- 
ing in a hospital and find there among the nurses and social 
workers of native American stock also Jewish, Italian and 
one or two colored women. Would you expect the Jewish 
women to have the traits commonly found in urban ghettos, 
the Italian those of the Sicilian peasantry, the colored those 
of the Southern small town? Or would you expect them, be- 
cause of thew similar trawmng—and the probability of ‘a 
similar home environment—to have more or less the same 
standards in matters of personal honor and morality? 

Is the danger of “moral infection” diminished when the 
work contacts between white and colored girls are such as to 
emphasize a difference in social status? For example— 


So far as is known, states a report from a large eastern 
city, no colored girl, unless she passes as white, is employed as 
a saleswoman. All colored girls acting at certain times as 
saleswomen are employed as “assistants” and paid a maid’s 
wage. 


Has it ever occurred to you that the difference of prestige 
enjoyed by different racial groups or the stereotypes of their 
character—often mistaken ones—popularized by moving pic- 
ture, fiction and stage in themselves create special moral 
dangers for women of these groups? 1 For example, have you 
met men who expected women of Spanish origin to be espe- 
cially “warm-blooded” or who regard every pretty Oriental 
girl as steeped in the tradition of the Geisha? Is the following 
account rare or typical? 


A colored teacher in a small western city, when asked as 
to the treatment received from white persons, had no com- 
plaint to make. She took special care to avoid exclusive stores, 
soda fountains, theaters or other places where she was not 
sure of being welcome. On one occasion she found it necessary 
to visit a dentist—the only dentist in town, a white man. As 
she was a little nervous, he playfully quieted her by patting 


*For an incident reflecting the alleged dishonesty of Mexicans and 
another illustrating the careless exposure of colored girls to danger, see 
examples No. 41 and 83 in And Who Is My Neighbor? 


Shop and Office 59 


her hands and arms. When she got up from the chair, he 
threw his arms around her and asked her if she ever “played 
around any.” She assured him that she did not, whereupon 
the dentist apologized. More difficult was it for her, one of . 
the few colored teachers in the place and an attractive young 
woman, to ward off the occasional attentions and familiarities 
of the school supervisor—undoubtedly a pillar of respecta- 
bility in the white community. 


Do men take more liberties with colored girls than with 
white? With immigrant than with native girls? How do you 
account for such a difference, uf any? 


LABOR ORGANIZATION 


Sometimes you hear as a reason for refusing to work with 
colored or foreign-born girls that they undercut salaries, that 
“they cannot be organized.” Do you know of cases where such 
a charge would be well-founded? What circumstances lead to 
its being made? Note this quotation: 


It is only when they are fortunate enough to get into a 
better class of work, and when they chance upon some well- 
organized establishment and are drawn into the union as a 
matter of course that we find Polish girls in unions at all. 
Intellectually they are not in the running with the Russian 
Jewess, and the peasant surroundings of their childhood have 
offered them few advantages. One evening, for instance, there 
were initiated into a glove-workers’ local seventeen new Polish 
members. Of these two only were able to read and write 
English, and of the remainder not more than half were able 
to read and write Polish. As to what is to be the later stand- 
ing and the ultimate contribution of the Polish girl, I cannot 
hazard a guess. I only know that she possesses fine qualities 
which we are not utilizing. . . . That Poles can be organized 
is shown by the remarkable success of the Polish National Alli- 
ance and kindred societies. Their capacity for codperation 
is seen in their establishment of their own codperative stores.* 


*The Trade Union Woman, Alice Henry. D. Appleton & Co., 1915. 
Price, $1.25. 


60 All Colors 


Is the criticism of non-codperation perhaps due to the same 
cause that gives Polish and other foreign-born women a repu- 
tation for slow and unsatisfactory work and low moral stand- 
ards—in other words, the fact that they are among the latest 
comers into our industrial, urbanized society? (And inciden- 
tally, does this also account for the same charge when made 
against colored women?) 


But let us hear what Miss Henry has to say, in the same 
book, concerning the contribution generally of foreign-born 
women to the organization of American women’s labor: 


The alien is forever being resented as an obstacle, even if 
an unconscious one, in the way of organization. Yet as far 
as women are concerned, it is to this group of aliens in par- 
ticular that is due the recent tremendous impulse towards 
organization among the most poorly paid women. In the 
sewing trades, and in some other trades, such as candy-making, 
it is the American girls who have accepted conditions, and 
allowed matters to drift from bad to worse. It is the foreign 
girl, and especially the Slavic Jewess, who has been making the 
fight for higher wages, shorter hours, better shop management, 
and above all, for the right to organize; and she has kept it 
up, year after year, and in city after city, in spite of all expec- 
tations to the contrary. 

One of the indirect benefits of the colossal strikes in the 
sewing trades in which these Jewish girls have played so con- 
spicuous a part has been the increasing degree in which those 
of differing nationalities have come to understand one another, 
as men and women having common difficulties and common 
rights, as all alike members of the great working people. 
Through sore trial many have learnt the meaning of “class 
consciousness” who never heard of the word. 

The new spirit is beginning to touch the Italian girl, and 
as time goes on, she, too, will be brought into the fold of 
unionism. 


Let us, before we quit this subject, see what another well- 
known student of American labor says about this charge that 
foreign-born women, by undercutting American wage stand- 
ards, have driven native-born girls out of many occupations: 


Shop and Office 61 


The desertion of mills and factories by native American 
girls has also been explained as their “displacement” by 
immigrants. The motive assigned is not economic, but racial; 
it is the social prejudice against the immigrant that has forced 
the American girl to quit. It seems, however, that this ex- 
planation mistakes cause for effect; the social stigma attach- 
ing to working association with immigrants is not the cause but 
the effect of the desertion of the mills and factories by native 
American women. The psychological interpretation overlooks 
one of the greatest economic changes that has taken place in 
the United States since the Civil War; the admission of women 
to most of the pursuits which were formerly regarded as pecu- 
liarly masculine. For every native woman of American paren- 
tage who left the mill or clothing factory there were forty 
women of the same nativity who found new openings. The 
increase of the number of native American professional 
women was nearly five times as great as the decrease of the 
number of native American factory girls. The marvelous prog- 
ress of the American educational system has fitted the native 
American woman for other work than manual labor and has 
at the same time opened to her a new field in which she does 
not meet the competition of the immigrant. 


Considerations such as these lead us away from the prob- 
lems involved in personal relationships with which we started 
this chapter. Let us keep those larger questions—which have 
to do with the economic issues and world migrations—for later 
consideration (in the last chapter). However, there are other 
aspects of our topic that are worth looking at: 


Work RELATIONS AND SOCIAL RELATIONS 


Is there any marked difference in the feelings aroused 
by having to work with girls of other races or nationalities 
according to the position they occupy in relation to your 
own work, especially as to whether they are under you, 
perform the same work or are placed above you? (Go 
back to some of the replies to the test in the first chapter.) 


*Immigration and Labor, by Isaac A. Hourwich. B. W. Huebsch, 
Inc., Revised Edition, 1922, p. 10. Price, $6.00. 


62 All Colors 


Do you think that jobs should be assigned always to those 
best able to do them, or that people of native white birth 
always should be given preference in that respect? 


What is the actual rule in the place where you work? Is 
only personal fitness taken into account in work assignments? 


Here are several examples that have come to hand: 


A colored girl in a dressmaking establishment writes: ‘I 
find that when a colored girl tries to get ahead, the employers 
will not let her—on the argument that the white girls will not 
have her in authority. This discourages the girl: to know that 
as long as she is at an occupation she will have to do the 
same thing that she started at. As there is no higher outlook, 
she feels that it doesn’t matter whether she does her work 
well, comes on time, stays on the job—for, if she leaves the 
job, she can always go to the next place and get the same 
sort of thing that she is doing here.” 


A girl in a hat-frame factory says: ‘The average colored 
girl in industry does not have the opportunities of the white 
girl. Take my own position as an example: I have been 
employed as an operator by this firm for nearly three years 
and I know for a fact that I do not get the same wages as the 
white girls who do the same work. I am the only colored girl 
employed there and both the employers and the employees 
are all very nice to me. I have known other white girls to 
come in to work and get better jobs and more pay than I, 
even though I had been there longer.” 


“The only real industry which I know,” writes a colored 


girl from Washington, D. C., “is the government printing 
work. So far as I know, the girls get the same amount of 
money for the specific work in which they are engaged. The 
girls work the same number of hours. But there is no chance 
for advancement in the work even though a girl is capable of 
being promoted to a higher position. The colored girl is 
allowed to go so far and no farther.” 


“T have been a stenographer in the government service in 
Washington for five years,” writes another. “I was the first 
stenographer employed in my department, but since that time 


Shop and Office 63 


I have broken in about five different white clerks and stenog- 
raphers who have sooner or later been placed above me in 
rank (title), although I receive a salary equal to the salary 
of those placed above me. This is not a kick, but simply an 
interesting experience, I think. To me it means that they 
would rather give you the salary than to give you a title, 
such as chief clerk, etc. However, I am perfectly satisfied 
with the position and am treated fine, indeed. I feel that I 
am rather fortunate. The white girls with whom I work are 
lovely. One of them has eaten lunch with me every day for 
three years and still does.” 


Notice the last remark in this letter: Js one of the reasons 
why girls sometimes refuse to work with those of other races 
that they feel working together means they must mix after 
working hours? Can you be “lovely” to a fellow-worker if 
you feel that associating with her may jeopardize your own 
social standing? Whose feelings do you consider when you 
refuse or agree to treat someone as your social equal—hers, 
your own, those of your family, of your girl friends, of men 
friends? 

Are failures to arrive at natural, friendly relations between 
workers of different races sometimes due to the fact that the 
more intimate contacts are made to precede the more formal 
associations? 


The following illustration seems to be in point: 


The staff of a social agency in an eastern city were in the 
habit of lunching together at the office. When a colored worker 
joined the staff, it did not occur to the head executive to 
exclude the newcomer from this privilege or even to mention 
the matter in advance. So when the new social worker sat 
down to lunch with the others, there was a distinct feeling of 
resentment and of embarrassment. Owing to the unpleasant- 
ness of the situation, the staff luncheons were abandoned soon 
afterwards. 

Since then white and colored social workers have worked 
together for several years under the auspices of this agency, 
and their professional contact has become most pleasant and 
cordial. Having learned to respect each other professionally, 


64 All Colors 


the workers of the two races have repeatedly taken part in 
staff picnics and other parties without the question of exclud- 
ing the colored ones coming up even in private conversation 
with the executive. This lady attributes her failure in the 
first instance and her eventual success in securing a cordial 
relationship between the white and the colored workers to the 
fact that it was a mistake to assume—with the prevailing 
attitudes in that particular community—that social recogni- 
tion could precede professional recognition. 


Let us see whether we cannot summarize some of the 
feelings that are likely to enter—though often uncon- 
sciously—into our relation with fellow workers of another 
race or nationality: 


First, as regards our own sense of congeniality—do we know 
from a girl’s color, physiognomy or name whether we shall 
like her? Have we from personal experience acquired an atti- 
tude toward each racial group—friendly or unfriendly as the 
case may be? Have we absorbed, without knowing it, the 
typical attitude toward each group that prevails in the com- 
munity or in that part of zt to which we belong? 

Second, how does concern for our work affect these feelings? 
Can we do our best work only when we are with congenial 
companions? And does that mean, persons who come from 
about the same sort of home as we do? Persons of our own 
heredity? Is there a special urge to do one’s best where there 
1s a variety of temperaments, abilities and outlooks among 
those employed at the same work? 

Third, how do our vocational prospects affect the matter? | 
Does it help us if competition for our kind of job is reserved 
for “Americans,” “Protestant—white,’ or other selected | 
groups? Have some groups, if admitted to an employment, a 
tendency to undercut wages? Do we know in advance that | 
they will be non-codperative in steps we may want to take to | 
wmprove working conditions? Does discrimination against | 
them in the matter of promotion or assignments make it easier | 
for us to get better jobs? 4 

Fourth, how does our social prestige enter into the situation? 


Shop and Office 65' 


Will people say we don’t amount to much when they see us 
in friendly association with colored girls, or what they might 
call “peasants”? Will the friends of colored women accuse 
them of servility when they see them behave pleasantly to 
white women? Do your men friends prefer girls that show a 
good deal of personal dignity? And does that imply a certain 
amount of stand-offishness in their relation to those who do not 
belong to their own circle? 

Which of these different considerations are weighing most 
with women in their attitudes toward those they work with? 


Which of the misgivings over a complete disregard of 
racial and national barriers in our work relations have a 
reasonable justification in our experience—and what shall 
we do about them? 


CLASSIFICATION OF CONTACTS 


You will remember that at the end of our previous chapters 
(p. 12 and p. 32) we have endeavored to list the different 
types of inter-racial contact involved—in the one case in home 
and neighborhood situations and in the other, in school and 
college situations. Let us see whether we cannot do something 
of that sort with the work situations also. Again, our first 
endeavor will be to list the different kinds of situations that 
have been illustrated in the incidents told and to see whether 
these naturally group themselves so that we can deal with 
them as involving several “types” of contact in each of which 
about the same kind of behavior would be appropriate. In 
this way we shall avoid having to deal with each situation as 
though it were unique and required a separate decision as to 
how we shall meet it. It is hoped that the reader will add 
from her own knowledge to the following partial summary of 
the situations mentioned or referred to in this chapter: 


(1) Italians debarred by an employer out of consideration 
for his “American” women workers; 

(2) Colored girls illegally deprived of their right to a civil 
service position, for the same reason; 


66 All Colors 


(3) Refusal of white girls to permit colored ones to perform 
any but tie most menial services; 

(4) Payment of lower wages to colored girls doing the same 
work as white girls in the same shop; also to colored 
nurses who do the same work and have undergone the 
same training as white nurses. 

(5) Colored girls in government office not promoted for 
fear of offending white girls; colored girl deprived of 
her proper rank for the same reason. 

(6) Lack of loyalty of immigrant women to an organized 
movement for improving working conditions; 

(7) White workers contented under a colored foreweoRnen 
where she happened to be the only one to know all the 
processes}; 

(8) Colored girls helping white (foreign-born) women to 
finish their job when they fall behind; 

(9) Harmony, where white and colored workers on the same 
job work separately under their own supervisors; 

(10) White and colored girl lunching together and congenial 
in their work relations. 


[This is not a complete list, and some important relation- 
ships are not represented in it because they do not happen to 
be illustrated in the given examples. Therefore, be sure to add 
to it before attempting classification. | 


As on the two previous occasions, we will again start on 
this list by trying to range the different situations in a number 
of possible divisions appropriate to our subject matter—race 
contacts in work relations. What divisions do you suggest? 
Here are some: Contacts at work and after work; with male 
and with female fellow workers; with people wnder you and 
above you and of the same rank with you; with colored people 
and with immigrants; in shops and in offices; situations created 
by others in the making of which you as one of the workers 
have had no say as against situations entered into voluntarily. 


How do the actual experiences that have been lsted fit 
into these divisions or others that the reader may have sug- 


Shop and Office 67 


gested? Does this sort of classification “get us anywhere?” 
For example, are the human realities different when a Jewish 
woman is advanced over a Gentile woman in a business office 
from those when an Italhan woman is promoted over a native 
American woman in a factory? Is your social prestige in 
your own home circle more likely to suffer when you are seen 
with a boy of dark foreign complexion, of good appearance 
and well dressed, or when you are seen with a colored girl? 
Does it make any difference whether the colored girl 1s dark 
or light? 


Shall we try our original threefold classification on these 
vocational experiences? It will be remembered that in order 
to distinguish between the different degrees in which we can 
do something about various types of situations, we distin- 
guished between 


I. Contacts that involve possibilities of relationships which, 
widespread and unchecked, might lead to race fusion or to the 
effacement of our cultural heritage; 

II. Contacts that hardly involve such possibilities at all 
but that do involve possible relations which, if generally ac- 
cepted, would lead to social re-arrangements as between one 
racial group and another; 

III. Contacts of so casual a character that they involve no 
large social issues of any kind except that of law and order 
and ordinary peaceful conduct as between strangers. 


Let us start with the ten experiences just listed, adding 
others which the reader may be able to contribute in their 


appropriate places: Does the following grouping strike you as 
about right? 


I. Nos. 4, 6; 
Tha Nosiil 2, 5; 
III. Nos. 3, 7, 8, 9, 10. 


Our first kind of situations, in this case, seems to differ 
from those we have included under that heading before; 


68 All Colors 


because working with women of another race does not offer — 
any special opportunities for the sort of intimacy that leads 
to intermarriage. [Of course it may be argued that all eco- 
nomic equality, by blurring the social distinctions between 
different racial groups, is apt to do so; in that case we should 
have to include a much larger variety of situations under I.] 
But the intimacy of shop, office or laboratory may lead to a 
mixing of standards of taste and behavior. Moreover, treat- 
ing people as equals at work makes it more difficult to regard 
them as belonging to an altogether inferior race. For example, 
where colored nurses are equal in training and admitted to the 
same positions as white nurses at the same pay, the idea that 
the Negro race is inherently inferior to the white must 
naturally receive a severe shock; and if there were many 
such shocks, a whole social edifice based on the alleged 
biological inferiority of one race compared with another would 
eventually collapse—even if there be no intermarriage at all. 
Again, if immigrant women, aided by their white fellow work- 
ers, were to raise themselves to their social status, a whole 
body of industrial and social tradition based on the assumed 
inherent inferiority of immigrant workers (“the racial types 
we get nowadays’) compared with native ones, would die out. 

In our second group we have a number of experiences that, 
deplorable as we may find them, are not directly within our 
individual sphere of action. Either the custom of the business 
or profession or an unjust attitude on the part of our particular 
employer has created a situation in which we are given a 
privileged position over our fellow workers without having 
particularly sought it. The choice of action, here, for the 
most part, does not lie so much within the range of our personal 
behavior toward those fellow workers as within the range of 
actions through which we might help in joint efforts to remove 
conditions that offend our sense of fair play or that seem to 
us dangerous in their social consequences. 

In the third group, we deal more directly with questions 
for individual behavior—though, of course, the dividing line 
between the different groups is faint, and many situations 


Shop and Office 69 


would fit into one as well as into another. Here we have such 
questions as the degree of friendliness which it is right to show 
in the relationships of common work to persons whom we may 
not be willing to recognize as social equals after work hours. 
Here also we have to think of our personal status—and that 
in more than one sense, for in the long run the marriage 
market may be more important to us than the employment 
market, and the opinion of our social circle of greater weight 
with us than that of the people we happen to work with. 
Every reader is likely to recall experiences that indicate how, 
on occasion, women of the privileged groups have dealt with 
such questions of conduct or of etiquette as these; and may 
have found herself more or less in agreement on the main 
lines. But other considerations will also have appeared in 
thinking over these situations about which we may feel less 
sure because they involve larger economic issues that we have 
not yet fully studied—such as the rate of immigration, the 
alleged threat of overpopulation, and the like. Answers to 
these questions we shall try to find in a later chapter; in the 
meantime keeping an open mind upon them. But again, as 
in our earlier discussions, we may feel that a choice of actions 
cannot always be postponed while we try to unravel all the 
more distant consequences that may be involved; and so in 
some of these situations we shall, no doubt, feel that we can 
decide upon lines of action that commend themselves to our 
common sense and general habits, ready to change around if 
at a later stage of our inquiry we should find reasons for 
coming to different conclusions. 

Let us see whether we cannot, as toward the end of the last 
chapter (p. 39 et seq.), again preliminarily list a series of 
possible individual and social actions for further consideration 
at the end of this course of studies. 


CHAPTER IV 
Church and Religious Association 


The relations considered so far cover a fairly large variety 
of the situations in which women of different branches of the 
human family are likely to come in contact. There is left 
one other type of situation that involves special opportunities 
—and special problems: the contacts in and through religious 
institutions and associations. 

Special opportunities, not only because in these organiza- 
tions we have a tradition that makes it easier for us to meet 
others at our best, but also because many of the problems left 
unsolved elsewhere will get a lift toward their solution if we 
look at them in the light of our convictions as regards the 
ultimate sense and purpose of life and our place in it. 

Special problems because, too often, our religious principles 
—and the moral principles that logically go with them—have 
come to us with no very definite application to every-day 
difficulties of conduct. To know that we must be honest and 
generous and just, for example, does not mean that we know 
how to exercise any of these virtues in a given situation. In 
fact, two equally good citizens and church members may come 
to totally opposite conclusions in a practical matter of apply- 
ing their common beliefs. How they behave in given cases 
will depend largely on their experiences, the way they have 
learned to interpret them, and a large body of inherited and 
unexamined attitudes. 


Tue CHURCH AND SOCIAL OPINION 


There is another difficulty: The church or congregation 
or other religious fellowship to which you belong is not an ideal 
70 


Church and Religious Association 71 


embodiment of the philosophy of life which it espouses but a 
human institution that is subject to all the normal failings 
of human nature. While it exists to promote religious teach- 
ings, it cannot exemplify these completely; for the actions of 
the members must necessarily be influenced by the social 
environment in which they spend their daily lives, with all 
its imperfections. Let us test this with the aid of a few typical 
illustrations: 


A clergyman in a semi-fashionable suburb of one of our 
large cities found that there were several hundred colored 
servants employed in private residences and in a large hotel, 
who, because there was no other Negro population of any 
kind, had no community life whatever. There was no colored 
church of any denomination nearer than that of a rather poor 
Negro section in a small town several miles away. The clergy- 
man therefore proposed to his congregation that a colored 
minister be engaged from the city to conduct a service for the 
colored members of the community on Sunday afternoons 
when the church premises stood unused. Indeed, when he 
made this suggestion he already had secured the promise of a 
competent Negro clergyman to undertake the task if invited. 

The congregation refused to entertain the idea. They 
strongly resented the proposed occupation of their pews by 
colored people. Not only that, the mere prospect of seeing 
colored people standing in groups on the steps of their church 
was distasteful to them. Evidently their own servants in 
their Sunday clothes had a totally different effect upon them 
from that they had in their accustomed uniforms and liveries. 
To make an issue of the matter, the clergyman thought, might 
have a bad effect upon the prevailing friendly attitudes 
between colored servants and their white employers and fel- 
low servants. So he let the matter drop, and several hundred 
perfectly respectable Christian men and women remain with- 
out opportunities for common worship. 


Just because religious institutions are often supposed to 
exemplify a spiritual approach to such questions, much more 
*There are several similar examples in And Who Is My Neighbor? 


Chapter VI, p. 173 et seq., that may be worth referring to unless illus- 
trations are produced from personal knowledge. 


72 All Colors 


rigorous tests are applied to the conduct of their members 
and officers, and attitudes are challenged which elsewhere go 
unnoticed. 


In a large middle-western city, the wife of a minister strenu- 
ously objected to the reception of three Spanish-Americans 
into the membership of the church—on the ground that “it 
will spoil the social standing of my husband.” Of the three 
“Mexicans,” two were fine young mechanics, American-born, 
and the third, though an immigrant, came from a Mexican 
family which had belonged to the denomination of the church 
in question for three generations. 


Here is a somewhat different illustration of the statement 
that members of religious institutions do not necessarily know 
how to apply their principles, however sincerely held in the 
abstract, to concrete problems for action: 


Antagonism between Protestants and Catholics and the 
pride of the “old families” complicate every community prob- 
lem in 8., a New England manufacturing town with a popula- 
tion of about eight thousand. In addition to a fairly large 
native American element, there are Italians, Poles, Germans, 
Irish and Swedes. 

A group of American women, through the D. A. R., the Red 
Cross and the Y. W. C. A., became interested in the immigrant 
groups which, they felt, were making too small a constructive 
contribution to the life of the community. They admitted that 
the fault was largely that of the American-born. As a first 
step, a nationality exposition was organized. Women repre- 
senting different nationalities were invited to join committees; 
handwork from fourteen countries was brought together for 
exhibition. Each evening of the three days’ exposition at the 
town hall different nationality groups performed dances, music 
and plays. Some 1800 to 2000 persons, representative of all 
parts of the population, attended. 

As a result of this happy experiment, a community council 
was formed to bring all groups together to work for the good 
of the town, more especially to arrange for similar events for 
the future. But again the Protestant-Catholic fuss somehow 
got started, ran through politics, school affairs, the Visiting 


Church and Religious Association me 


Nurse Association and other societies, and killed the com- 
munity council. | 

All that remains of the original effort are some small clubs 
of foreign-born girls under the auspices of the Y. W. C. A. 


As you examine this account, you will find that a number of 
group contrasts are involved: Protestant and Catholic, old 
families and new, Nordic (so-called) and Alpine and Mediter- 
ranean; and in the background we may suspect others: large 
taxpayers and social workers, conservatives and liberals; sym- 
pathizers with the Allied cause in the late war and sym- 
pathizers with the Central Powers. Such contrasts are fairly 
typical of an American community. Into the midst of them 
come Christian organizations and social agencies established 
to exemplify in deeds a humanitarian philosophy of life. They 
not only confront non-Christian and non-humanitarian mo- 
tives but within their own membership are likely to be divided 
on matters of consequence to the life of the community. The 
question we ought to discuss is not, why do these institutions 
fail to make the town live according to the golden rule, but: 
What, under the conditions as they actually are, can they do 
to bring the different elements of the population to a fuller 
mutual understanding and appreciation? What ingredients 
were left out, if any, in the actual enterprises they set on foot 
with that end in view, that might have led to greater success? 


Did the nationality exposition and the community council 
bring the average men and women of the community more 
closely together? What can women, in particular, do in that 
direction? 


Perhaps one of the following examples, from the Southwest, 
may suggest ways in which women in all parts of the country 
might make a contribution to more permanently harmonious 
contacts than those named: 


EXAMPLES OF APPLIED RELIGION 


A certain social worker in Southern California has worked 
out a plan whereby groups of Mexican women, of five each, 


74 All Colors 


are invited each Friday to have lunch in an American home. 
This not only tends to acquaint the Mexicans with American 
ways of doing things but also brings the American women to 
a better understanding of the Mexicans and their traits and 
viewpoints. , 

A church in the same part of the country has worked out a 
plan under which each Mexican family in the community is 
assigned to an American family for friendly contact. Visits 
are made back and forth. Of course, there is no charity or 
other ulterior purpose connected with them. It is said that 
with this plan the Americans have been helped to understand 
the Mexicans, and the Mexican families have gained a better 
knowledge of the inner workings of an American home—and 
understanding better the sort of homes Americans care for and 
the way they are trying to bring up their children, they also 
get a clearer grasp of what their American fellow-citizens are 
aiming at in other matters. 


What specific types of personal contact or social activities 
would you suggest as likely to have made the nationality ex- 
hibition and the community council of the earlier example 
more of a success? 


Do you think that community efforts are the only effec- 
tive means of countering racial friction in the community? 


How are we to get a start? Can you think of examples illus- 
trating that wm a strained situation personal effort may be 
worthwhile? | 


Here is one: 


“I have been told of a fine Christian woman in the city 
of Buffalo who, instead of withdrawing before the incoming 
flood of Italians which surrounded her home, decided to remain 
and live her life among them as an interpreter of Christian 
America. She died a few months ago, and the pastor who 
officiated at the funeral service in that home told me what a 
profound impression her life had left upon that community 


Church and Religious Association 75 


and of the evidences of love and esteem that were manifest 
at the community funeral.” ? 


Well, someone says, she was evidently a woman of leisure, 
perhaps had money. But what can I do—a mere girl? The 
following account was published recently in Christian Work 
as the prize essay in a competition for accounts of “the best 
public service accomplished by any church without regard to 
denominational lines.” It is rather long; but you will find 
it worth reading: 


When it was conceived and carried through, the bit of serv- 
ice I am about to describe did not seem particularly signifi- 
cant. But, in view of what it accomplished, it stands out as 
perhaps the best piece of social work ever done by our church. 
And the expense involved, both of time and money, was but a 
fraction of that incurred in many another less fruitful effort. 

An active worker in our Young People’s Christian Union is 
employed in a studio where a young colored woman is also one 
of the office force. Both girls are high type, truly representa- 
tive of the best of their respective races. Naturally they be- 
came friends. The colored girl is the leader of a large group 
of young people in her own church. Being of unusual intelli- 
gence, culture and high moral character, she exerts a power- 
ful influence among them. One day she suggested to our young 
worker an exchange of visits between their two young people’s 
organizations. That her group could possibly be of any help 
to ours she never dreamed. But she was eager to enlarge the 
vision of her own group. She wanted them to meet white 
young people under the proper auspices that they might under- 
stand each other better and perhaps allay some of the unhappy 
prejudice between the races. 

Our Union adopted the suggestion with alacrity. Truth to 
tell, most of them thought of it only as a “lark.” Some liked 
the novelty of it, never having visited a Negro church. Maybe 
a few understood its actual significance. It was decided that 
our society should pay the first visit, going, on an agreed Sun- 
day afternoon, to be the guests of the colored people. 

Our churches are only a mile apart; but every city-dweller 


*Christian Americanization. Charles A. Brooks. Council of Women 
for Home Missions, 1919. Price, 75 cents. 


76 All Colors 


knows what a difference only a block or two can make in a 
place like Detroit. The church we were to visit stands in the 
heart of a thickly populated Negro district. On the appointed 
day some fifty of our young people, ranging in years from 
fifteen to thirty-five, arrived at the colored church. No royal 
embassy was ever more graciously received, in spite of the 
evident nervousness on the part of our hosts. We were con- 
ducted to the auditorium on the second floor of the old, 
weather-beaten frame building; and, after a simple address of 
welcome, our party gave an appropriate program of songs, 
readings and instrumental music. Then all adjourned to the 
“parlors” on the lower floor, where light refreshments were 
served, and the colored people put on a delightful little im- 
promptu program. The spirit of friendly good-fellowship was 
a revelation to everybody. Some of our young people realized 
for the first time that Negroes were really “folks.” Yet every- 
thing was in perfect decorum, without a suggestion of unbe- 
coming familiarity. 

Just a month later the colored society paid us a return visit. 
They came more than a hundred strong, ranging in age from 
four to sixty years—many of them with mixed motives, no 
doubt! Remembering the pathetically barren rooms in which 
our guests worked and worshipped, we were almost ashamed 
to receive them into our big, roomy, comfortable hall and 
parish house. However, everybody was soon perfectly at 
ease. 

On this day the order was reversed. The colored people 
gave the formal program, then all repaired to the church par- 
lors where refreshments were served and an impromptu pro- 
gram furnished by our Unioners. And such happiness I have 
rarely witnessed as beamed upon those chocolate and ebony 
faces. Of course we were just as happy as they; for were we 
not making them happy? 

Scores of our guests were eager to inspect our splendid 
church plant. In the midst of the enjoyment our big-hearted 
organist came in, caught the spirit of the occasion, and offered 
to play a short recital if all would come into the church audi- 
torium. With every mark of reverence, even awe, those scores 
of young people filed in and listened to a half-hour of music 
from the great organ. The effect of it was well voiced by one 
young man, who said, “This is the first time I ever heard a 


Church and Religious Association 77 


wonderful organ like that. Il never pass this church again 
without thinking of it and being uplifted.” 

They were loath to go. It was three hours after the time 
of arrival when the last guest took his reluctant departure. 

I say again that this stands out as our best piece of public 
service for a long period. It was not merely “giving” some- 
thing, for we actually received more than we gave. It was co- 
operative, all meeting on a common human level. The effect 
upon our young people was marked. They do not use the word 
“nigger” in the usual contemptuous fashion any more. And 
they want to do it again! 

And the colored people of that other church are our friends 
in a new and enduring sense. They would defend us against 
any peril, danger, slander or vicious misunderstanding. All 
white people stand higher in their opinion because of us. 


Now, the reader may say, these were unusual girls. There 
are few of us, she may add, who can do something that way 
on our own hook. 


What can I do through my church to improve race rela- 
tions when many of the girls of my own age in the church 
are themselves prejudiced, or when the older people will 
not let the younger group have any share in the responsi- 
bility at all? 


A Dirricutt CASE AND THE Way Out 
Perhaps the following account will help a little: 


In a Michigan city there was a fashionable downtown ~ 
church that was ministering to the elite of the local society. 
Gradually, however, the neighborhood became crowded with 
immigrants of different nationalities, and nearly all the old 
families moved out to the suburbs. While most of the new- 
comers preferred their own congregations, there was a little 
group of Syrians who felt at home in this Protestant church, 
because of the similarity of its rituals to those they were 
accustomed to. They were encouraged to come and made to 
feel at home, so far as that was possible when naturally many 
of the older church members felt upset to see around them 


78 All Colors 


swarthy faces. Gradually, the Syrian children were drawn 
into the Sunday school until, in the last few years, they num- 
bered fully three quarters of the scholars. 

The Girls’ Friendly Society in the church, through its can- 
didates’ class (for girls between eight and sixteen) received a 
large number of Syrian girls, until to-day more than one half 
of the branch is made up of Syrian girls and the other half of 
girls from middle-class native American families. 

Until quite recently, the Syrian and American girls seemed 
to get on amicably together. This was up to the time when 
most of them reached the age of sixteen or thereabouts. They 
were accustomed to being together in Sunday school and in 
other church activities, so that it seemed natural for them to 
be associated in the Girls’ Friendly Society. 

However, a difficult situation began to develop which unfor- 
tunately coincided with the removal of the able woman who 
up to that time had led the group. Differences of increasing 
sharpness arose between the native and the Syrian girls until 
it became a serious question whether they should wholly part 
company, that is whether the American girls should turn the 
others out, or whether each group should have its own society. 
Several circumstances, it was found, had contributed to the 
difficulty: 'The American girls were of the type who wished 
to go to high-school and afterwards to enter some line of busi- 
ness open to women. Like most girls of the same type, while 
interested in amusements and men, they were most interested 
at this time in fitting themselves for their vocations. Their 
social life was that of the typical high-school group and 
brought them in contact with young men finishing high-school 
or starting in work as clerks. 

The Syrian girls, so long as they attended the public school, 
had apparently shared the same social outlook as the other 
girls, though naturally their home background was different. 
At the ages of fifteen and sixteen, the differences became more 
obvious. The Syrian girls could not afford to go to high- 
school, many of them, and went to work in a cigar factory and 
such places. That meant they were subject on week days to 
totally different influences from those surrounding the native 
American girls. Moreover, since in their families it had been 
customary for girls to marry at about their age, they had a 
totally different attitude toward boys and men. 


Church and. Religious Association 79 


The meetings of the society brought out these differences. 
The American girls took pride in conducting their club meet- 
ings in an orderly, parliamentary fashion, so well engendered 
by high-school training. The Syrian girls, wearied with the 
day in the factory, and unaccustomed to such procedure, re- 
garded this as sheer nonsense and broke the monotony of the 
procedure with all kinds of interruptions. For instance, the 
leader of the Syrian girls, a handsome, capable girl, who, how- 
ever, had become somewhat coarsened and hoydenish through 
her experience in the factory, would make fun of the chairman 
of the meeting, pay no attention to rules of order and discuss 
irrelevant personal matters. 

This, however, was not the chief difficulty. It was the cus- 
tom of this group to have small social affairs, sometimes en- 
tirely for their own members with, perhaps, a few invited out- 
side girls, sometimes for their boy friends. At these times the 
social background of the two groups more and more showed 
itself radically different. At the first kind of affair, the 
American girls sought to do everything in a dignified and 
socially correct manner. The Syrian girls’ lack of experience 
with American conventions made them seem boorish. It was 
not that they lacked courtesy, for in their simple ways Syrians 
are most punctilious about conventions they recognize; but 
the conventions they had learned at home were not those of 
the American girls’ homes; moreover, they had been rough- 
ened by the coarser manners of the factory. The American 
girls claimed not to mind these differences much, as they 
understood their Syrian friends, but they were embarrassed 
when they had guests from outside who thought it strange that 
they should be associating with “such a low class of 
foreigners.” 

The mixed social affairs were still worse. The American 
girls would invite their boy friends from school or business, 
and the Syrian girls their friends from the factory, the auto- 
mobile shop or the grocery store. The American girls were 
especially annoyed with the loud manners of the Syrian girls 
in the presence of men and the free and easy way in which 
they treated them. Perhaps there was a little jealousy, too, 
for the Syrian girls were pretty, and of course the boys rather 
liked them. Of the Syrian boys’ behavior, the American girls 
made no complaint. Though they lacked education and refine- 


80 All Colors 


ment, they were courteous and thoughtful in their treatment 
of the American girls. 

To make a long story short, the difficulty continued until 
someone studied the situation and suggested a way out. Un- 
derlying all their differences, both the Syrian and the Ameri- 
can girls really still cared for each other and desired to belong 
to the society. Nevertheless, the Syrian girls would pay no 
attention to the sincere efforts of the American girls to lead 
them to a higher plane of social life. The latter did not know 
how to interest them where a more experienced woman would 
have succeeded in doing so. At the same time, the American 
girls were not given moral support by their elders and friends 
in their conscientious effort to keep the Syrian girls part of 
their society but suffered adverse criticism. 

While no attempt was made to bring two groups of girls of 
such different experiences together in any wholesale manner, 
the fact that these particular girls had got on together hap- 
pily in the past was made the basis for an object lesson in 
Christian forbearance. Under wise leadership, the society has 
been continued; the Syrian girls were persuaded that they 
must try to adapt themselves a little more to American ideas 
of deportment if they wanted to maintain the old associations. 
The American girls were made to feel that they were part of 
a far-reaching experiment in bridging the differences of class 
and race and that, if necessary, they must make the sacrifice 
of not inviting their American friends indiscriminately to their 
social affairs but only those who understood and sympathized 
with what they were trying to do. 


Now, to come to the point, do opportunities not exist in 
almost every church? Even where there are no present con- 
tacts, have we not perhaps a challenge here for those who 
would, to the best of their ability, live out the ideal of inter- 
racial sisterhood they proclaim? 


ReEeuicious ASSOCIATIONS AND SocIAL OPINION 


At this point, it may be worth while briefly to consider some 
of the questions raised in this chapter from the point of view 
of the opportunities provided within those religious associa- 
tions that flourish on the campus or to which young women 


Church and Religious Association 81 


often belong. It is no secret where, for the most part, they 
stand on this matter theoretically. We also know that they 
do not always live up to their ideals any more than do the 
churches, and for the same reasons. For example: 


Social workers among the Japanese know that, on the whole, 
they are very cleanly in their habits. There was no objection, 
therefore, on the part of the executives of a religious associa- 
tion in a western city when the members of the Japanese 
branch, which occupied a separate building, asked for permis- 
sion to use the swimming pool in the main building at certain 
times, to accede to that request. A few Japanese girls had 
long been in the habit of making use of the swimming pool, 
and no one had said anything about it. Immediately 
vehement protests were made by the white members: 


“We can’t use the pool after these Japs.” 

“Since when has this building been given over to the Japs?” 

“Tf they swim here, we can’t.” 

Under the circumstances, it was deemed best not to pursue 
the plan, and the Japanese branch was informed that its mem- 
bers could not come in groups. 


In one of our largest eastern cities, two colored teachers 
came to the cafeteria of a religious institution situated on the 
margin between a white and a Negro neighborhood. The 
manager asked them “Do you belong to this branch?” They 
said they did not but belonged to another branch. They added 
they were public school teachers. “Are you registered at any 
classes here?” ‘They were not. “Well, then, you had better 
go to the so-and-so branch (colored).” That branch was half 
a mile away. 


A colored social worker had to sit up all night in a station 
waiting room in a city near the Southern border. There was 
no colored institution or hotel in the town, and she knew no 
one except officers in the local Christian institution for women. 
The secretary of this house did not know what to do with the 
woman. To put her up would have alienated, she thought, 
white support. She telephoned to the president for advice. 
“Of course,” said that lady, “she must find a room somewhere 
with a colored family.”’ Whether there was a suitable colored 


82 All Colors 


home willing to take the stranger and how the stranger was to 
go about finding it, neither of the white women, apparently, 
gave a thought. 


Now, don’t get discouraged. These things happen in the 
best of families. The reader will have no difficulty in finding 
cases in which problems of this sort have been solved tactfully 
and with full fairness to all the interests involved. 


Can the object of understanding and mutual appreciation 
between white and colored (or native and foreign-born) women 
be achieved only by permitting no difference of treatment 
whatever? 


How far must a religious organization go to satisfy the 
prevailing public opinion in the community? 


Can its officers disregard that opinion altogether? What 
seem to you practicable steps for overcoming reluctance and 
even hostility within the organization toward inter-racial 
activities? + 


It is not always possible from reading about the way in 
which a group of people have handled a situation to know 
whether they really have solved the problems involved in it. 
We have to guess at the atmosphere and the personalities and 
the probable general effect and consequences produced. What, 
for example, do you think of the following account of an 
endeavor to secure race tolerance in the work of a Christian 


* Much thought has gone into the education of public opinion; and it 
is possible now to devise means for accomplishing the ends here sought 
without the use of objectionable methods of coercion. The essence 
of the matter is that people learn most readily when they secure 
satisfaction from a given way of action. Repeated practice with satis- 
faction builds up mind-sets and thought habits favorable to the end 
in view. For a full presentation of this new theory of educational 
method see Foundations of Method by William Heard Kilpatrick, 
Macmillan Co., 1925. Price, $2.00 (briefly summarized in the Occa- 
sional Papers of the Inquiry for J anuary, 1926) or, with more immediate 
relation to our problem, the same author’s paper on Education and 
Public Opinion in the Teachers College Record for November, 1923 
(Vol. XXIV, No. 5, p. 417 et seq.). 


Church and Religious Association 83 


association? This work has been held up both for praise and 
for blame: | 


Some years ago, a Christian Association was established in 
a small Indiana town. Within a few months, a colored girl 
who was the president of a small club of colored girls in the 
town came to the secretary and asked her to help them pro- 
mote the club and plan its program. With the hearty endorse- 
ment of a majority of the board, this club was made part of 
the local institution. 

At first it did not meet in the Y. W. C. A. rooms, partly be- 
cause there was no separate club room, but the different clubs 
met in the general rest room. The colored club was held in 
a colored Baptist Church until during the war, because of the 
need for conserving coal, this arrangement was changed, and 
the colored girls were invited to meet at the homes of the board 
members. When the Y. W. C. A. enlarged its quarters, a per- 
manent home for this club, with others, was found on its 
premises. 

In the history of this club, little opposition had to be over- 
come. The board members were interested in it and have 
responded warmly when invited to give talks to the girls. At 
a World Fellowship supper, a table was reserved for the col- 
ored girls in the same way as for other national or racial 
groups, and they took part in the program. For two years the 
club has served the annual membership supper for the whole 
Y, and a number of times it has contributed the singing of 
spirituals to programs. 

The thirty or more members of the club are of different ages, 
and under the leadership of a capable and highly respected 
colored woman, are considered to have come nearer realization 
of the fourfold ideal of the Y. W. C. A. than any of the other 
clubs. Three of the members have recently graduated from 
high school. The white women of the Y. W. C. A. look upon 
this colored club as an asset rather than a liability. 


STANDARDS OF EruHicaL ConpbucT 


Do you think that action of this kind would be desirable 
or possible in every part of the country? Must we make 
allowances, in our demand that religious people be loyal to 


84 All Colors 


their principles, for the special difficulties to be found in the - 
prevailing race attitudes of some parts of the country as 
against those of others? What would you look upon as mini- 
mum demands upon any majority group in its treatment of, 
and attitude toward, minority groups if 1t claims to be Chris- 
tian more than in name? For example, which of the following 
aims would you include as an essential in any ethical program 
of race cooperation? Number those which you accept in what 
you consider the order of their importance. 


Justice in all dealings as between one racial group and 
another 

Efforts to promote mutual understanding 

Efforts to promote mutual appreciation 

No segregation in places of worship or Christian education 

No exclusion from membership in Christian congregations 
and associations 

Inclusion in social affairs under public or church auspices 

Inclusion in private, social intercourse. 


Did you, in recording your opimons, have in mind some 
particular community, or has your answer been given urth 
the understanding that it holds good everywhere—for example 
an the South as between whites and Negroes, in the West as 
regards Orientals, in New England as regards Portuguese, etc.? 
If some of the demands upon social behavior may fairly be 
made in one part of the country but not in another, or under 
some local circumstances but not under others, how shall we 
decide in any given place whether they should apply or not? 


Must we condone practices in some communities which 
we would condemn as intolerant and intolerable in others? 
If we allow differences in conduct according to differ- 
ences in traditional local sentiments or other conditions 
(often brought about by differences in history), by what 
tests shall we in any specific locality decide which atti- 
tudes and practices are praiseworthy and which are to be 
condemned? 


Church and Religious Association 85 


CLASSIFICATION OF CONTACTS 


Shall we again try to classify the different kinds of situa- 
tion in which race contacts are brought about—this time 
through membership in churches and associations with a re- 
ligious aim? Here are some of the situations that have been 
mentioned or referred to: 


(1) 
(2 


—- 


(3) 
(4) 
(5) 
(6) 


(7) 


(8) 
(9) 


(10) 


(11) 


(12) 


Use of church premises for services of colored 
servants; 

Foreign-born peoples coming into the neighborhood 
transform an old family church; 

Protest of white residents to the proposed establish- 
ment of a Japanese Protestant church in their neigh- 
borhood; 

A group of native and Syrian girls in a city church 
decide to overcome their real cultural differences so 
as to maintain an object lesson of inter-racial friend- 
ship; ; 

A Christian Union of young people develops a program 
of cooperative activities with a colored church; 
Filipino student ostracized at a church party; 
Unsuccessful efforts of a Christian group of women to 
bring different national groups together by means of 
nationality exposition and community council; 
Churchwomen inviting foreign-born women into their 
homes as equals and exchanging visits with them; 

A churchwoman of means refuses to leave her home 
when neighborhood becomes foreign but devotes her 
life to the welfare of her new neighbors; 

Members of a western Christian institution refuse the 
use of their swimming pool to the members of a Japa- 
nese branch; 

A Christian institution in an eastern city bars educated 
colored women from use of its cafeteria; 

A colored religious worker is refused shelter in the 
religious institution for women in a city where she is 
a stranger; 


86 All Colors 


(13) A religious institution in a middle-western small town 
develops a codperative white and colored program. 


Into what main types, from the point of view of the con- 
tacts they involve between persons of different races and na- 
tionalities, do these situations, and the others that have been 
brought up in the course of the discussion, naturally divide 
themselves? Some fairly obvious ones suggest themselves: 
common worship and social activities; programs and policies 
involving a whole church or institution and those involving 
only individuals or smaller groups of members. You will want 
to add other distinctions. 


Does discussion along any of these lines help us to recog- 
mize differences in the situations so essential that they must 
give a different slant to our attitude toward them? 


Have we a different kind of duty in situations involving 
foreign-born white groups and in situations involving 
racially more remote groups—Negroes or Mexicans or 
Orientals? 


Is our social prestige threatened by contacts in these situa- 
tions—exactly as it would be by similar situations if they 
arose at home, on the college campus or at work? For ez- 
ample, 1s a church social comparable in this respect with a 
school party or an office picnic? What other significant simi- 
larities and differences do you discover in comparing the situa- 
tions brought up in this chapter with those previously talked 
about? 


Shall we see whether the threefold division which we have 
applied to our previous experiences also applies here—whether 
it helps to visualize more clearly what the problems for our 
conduct really are? You will remember the three main types 
of situations under which we tried to range our experiences: 


I. Contacts that involve possibilities of relationships 
which, widespread and unchecked, might lead to race 
fusion or to the effacement of our cultural heritage;. 


Church and Religious Association 87 


II. Contacts that hardly involve such possibilities at all 
but do involve possible relations which, if generally 
accepted, would lead to social rearrangements as be- 
tween one racial group and another; 

III. Contacts of so casual a character that they involve no 
large social issues of any kind except that of law and 

order and ordinary peaceful conduct as between 
strangers. 


We will start with the thirteen experiences just listed and 
others which the reader may be able to add to them, and try 
to put each of them under one of these three heads—conscious 
of the fact that the divisions between them are not absolute, 
and that some of the examples might equally well be con- 
sidered under one of the heads as under another. This is about 
the result we get (though, if the reader wishes to switch some 
of them over into one of the other classes, she should do so): 


I. Nos. 2, 4, 6, 7; 
Meee oil 3,010,) 11, 12: 
III. Nos. 5, 8, 9, 18. 


This time our distribution is almost an equal one. Our last 
group (III) in which we see possibilities of immediate action 
without having to wait for the verdict of an inquiry into 
deeper issues and without having first to convert a lot of other 
people, contains several examples of the sort of thing a deter- 
mined bunch of young people can do if they are so minded; 
examples also of what the conduct of individuals in difficult 
situations may mean for adjusting different groups in the 
community and leading them to mutual appreciation. While 
mutual home visits are involved in some of these experiences, 
they are not of a kind at all likely to lead to intermarriage 
or to a swamping of accepted home standards through the 
influence of the new groups. 

In the second or middle group we have several examples 
that illustrate the force of group attitudes and the difficulty 
which individuals will have in efforts to get what may seem to 


88 All Colors 


them improvements in group relations until some of these atti- 
tudes are changed. Here we shall again turn to the teaching 
of Professor Kilpatrick (see page 82, footnote) to see in what 
way we may best attempt to break down existing unfavorable 
mind-sets. 

In this connection we shall also ask ourselves more thor- 
oughly than we have done previously how we are to draw the 
line between prejudice and justifiable discriminations. We 
are not so much concerned with academic distinctions, how- 
ever, ag we are with a very practical question: 


Must an organization—a church congregation, for ex- 
ample—first be completely purged of prejudice—assum- 
ing we know exactly what that is and do not confuse it 
with other causes of discrimination—before it can take 
action that will make for greater harmony between racial 
groups? + 


Would it be possible, do you think, to get that suburban 
congregation more interested in the welfare of their colored 
servants without arousing the issue of| racial superiority and 
anferrority? Must the members of a white religious associa- 
tion first study the biology of race before they can be per- 
suaded to let Japanese clubs share their swimming pool? Does 
connection with a church or a religious organization help or 
hinder such efforts? Could the same considerations that are 
found helpful in these situations also be brought to bear upon 
the other situations wn this category (II) which we have dis- 
cussed in previous chapters and which le quite outside the 
direct influence of religious institutions? 


Now let us, for a moment, turn to the situations that are 
left over (type I). Here we have those about which we are 
least sure, in so far as our personal attitude toward them is 
concerned. Foreign groups coming into the neighborhood will 
normally not have many social contacts at first. But if we 


*There is no generally accepted definition of prejudice. However, 
eae purpose the one given on p. 212 of And Who Is My Neighbor? 
will suffice. 


Church and Religious Association 89 


open our churches to them, of course, we shall have personal 
and social relations and, with these, a blurring of our cultural 
heritage—in other words, the introduction of different stand- 
ards (whether higher or lower is a question we need not decide 
now) and increased possibility of intermarriage. In illustra- 
tion of this matter, the following letter from a pastor’s wife 
will be to the point. She writes from a neighborhood in a 
large eastern city where once fashionable residences have be- 
come converted into lodging houses and a Negro colony is now 
growing up: 


We are troubled about the social ties which may develop 
between white men and some of the attractive young Mulatto 
girls who come to the church. These girls are often well edu- 
cated, and some of them can hardly be recognized as having 
negro blood. A young man, descended from a Mayflower 
ancestor, has fallen in love with one of them and married her. 
Should we continue to encourage these friendly relations, even 
when the results may be more of such miscegenation? 


Let us take this letter for the text of our next chapter. 
Before we attempt to answer it, we must find out more about 
miscegenation and what it means. 


* This ugly word may serve as a sample of the misleading associations 
that often arise from the sound or mistaken etymology of a word. 
Miscegenation of course, has no connection with the root ms (short 
for miss, or err), that appears in the two italicized words of the previous 
sentence, but is derived from miscere, a neutral term denoting mixing. 


CHAPTER V 
Husbands and Children 


In this chapter we must abandon, for the time, the par- 
ticular point of view from which we have approached our sub- 
ject in previous ones. We have surveyed some of the major 
types of contact between members of different races and na- 
tionalities that are open to the great majority of girls and. 
young women: home and neighborhood, school and college, 
shop and office, church and religious association—or in other 
words, contacts that are social, educational, vocational and 
through common religious ideals. 

In each of these relationships we have come up against 
some problems where a prompt conclusion as to desirable 
forms of behavior and social action was possible—because 
the rights and wrongs of the case were fairly obvious. In 
each we also have come up against problems for which prob- 
ably the reader did not at once find an answer because she 
may have felt that she did not know enough of the probable 
consequences that would follow one line of action or another. 
Or rather, while in some situations we can easily foresee the 
ummediate consequences of each possible choice, we are often 
unable to recognize the larger social consequences. And, 
obviously, there is nothing permanently satisfying in “solu- 
tions” that get us out of a hole, in the sense of a difficulty we 
must negotiate, if they only create new and, perhaps, more 
difficult problems later. 

For example, it may seem to some that social friction be- 
tween Gentiles and Jews at a certain college might best be 
done away with if the Gentile students were to give up all 
exclusiveness and admit Jews to their fraternities and sorori- 
ties. But then someone is likely to say that, being more clever 

90 


Husbands and Children 91 


than others, Jewish girls will get hold of too many offices and 
after a while “run the whole show.” When that happens, 
they will add, this nice old New England college with its 
splendid traditions will have become something totally dif- 
ferent; and the students will have contributed toward breaking 
down those traditions. Maybe these should be broken, maybe 
this New England culture is not all that some have cracked 
it up to be—but before we make a decision of that sort, ought 
we not to make a close study of what that culture really is 
and what it has meant to the world? 

Or again someone says, all this business of moving out when 
colored families move into the neighborhood is nonsense. 
They have as good a right to buy property in a select neigh- 
borhood as we have. But here another voice interrupts to say 
that, while there may be no particular objection to colored 
neighbors “if they are no worse than the horrid people who live 
next door now,” yet would it not lead to friendship between 
the families, and might the result not be more marriages be- 
tween white and colored? And has not science proved that 
mixing breeds leads to decadence? 

So here we are, in the two remaining chapters, trying to 
come to grips with some of these larger issues. We all look 
upon marriage as pretty important—for others if not for our- 
selves—so we may as well start with that. 


INTIMATE CONTACTS 


You will remember the “opinion test’ with which we 
started (page 2). Some of the answers given there will have 
been made with the thought that certain of the different kinds 
of association noted would be more apt to lead to intimacy 
and possibly to marriage than others. For example, in invit- 
ing someone “‘to my house as social equal” I am expressing 
a totally different attitude toward her than by being willing 
to have her work for me. It is the same if for individuals 
we substitute whole races and nationalities. Having Mexi- 
cans coming up in carloads to work on the railroads or in 


92 _ All Colors 


lumberyards, where they are usually treated as an inferior 
people, is not making it probable that many of them will 
marry into our circles. But if there are Mexican students at 
our college and they are invited into the fraternities, take part 
in all social activities and often spend week-ends at our homes, 
the matter looks quite different. You cannot conscientiously 
put the subject aside by saying, “I can be good friends with a 
fellow without wanting to marry him.” Maybe you can, and 
maybe you do not really know what you may do when your 
feelings are aroused in a new way, or when and how that may 
happen. Besides, are not the “fellow’s” feelings to be con- 
sidered, too? Are we to encourage him to think of himself as 
in every way, except personal differences, the equal of other 
men around us when we really regard as inferior the people 
to which he belongs and would not dream of marrying one of 
them, as the saying is, “if he were the last man on earth’? 

No, we must make up our minds what to think of this mat- 
ter of racial intermarriage. We have not only our feelings 
to consider, but a good many other matters—our family, our 
friends, our professional chances perhaps, and above all the 
possibility of children. It is that which bothers us most. Are 
children of mixed marriages likely to be defective? Is it true 
that they inherit the worst traits of both parent stocks? Is 
it true that they will be unstable and through life be torn by 
conflicting emotions? 


Aips To FURTHER STUDY 


Well, here we have some questions we cannot answer off- 
hand; but fortunately there is accessible a literature of a suffi- 
ciently scientific character to help us out. Obviously, opin- 
ions are of little use to us in this connection, and we must make 
the effort to acquaint ourselves at least with the most impor- 
tant facts that are to the point. The following books are 
recommended as bearing upon the subject matter of this and 
the following chapter. The particular sections indicated refer 
more particularly to the subject of racial intermarriage: 


Husbands and Children 93 


Studies in Evolution and Eugenics by 8. J. Holmes. Harcourt, 
Brace & Co., 1923. Price $3.00. Especially Chapter XV. 
Democracy and Assimilation by Julius Drachsler. Macmil- 
lan Co., 1920. Price $2.50. Especially Part II. (Don’t 
lose courage over the difficult parts of Chapter IV; they are 
followed by the very readable “interpretations” in Chap- 
ter. V.) 

Anthropology by A. L. Kroeber. Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1923. 
Price $5.00. Especially Chapter IV. 

The Character of Races by Ellsworth Huntington, Charles 
Scribner’s Sons, 1924. Price $5.00. Especially Chapter 
XITI. 


To balance this factual evidence, it may be worth while to 
glance also at the literature that portrays existing attitudes 
toward racial intermarriage—for these attitudes are part of 
the situation that confronts us: 


A summary of current views on this topic is contained in 
The Menace of Color by J. W. Gregory (J. B. Lippincott Co., 
1925. Price $4.50). For a vigorous statement of the South- 
ern point of view see The Color Line by William Benjamin 
Smith (McClure, Phillips & Co., 1904). There is no serious 
contribution advocating racial intermarriage as a matter of 
social policy or ethics. 


To these books may be added biography and works of 
imagination descriptive of situations brought about by racial 
intermarriage—remembering, however, that fiction and drama, 
no matter how realistically, deal with the exceptional and not 
with typical happenings and therefore must not be taken as 
representative of normal relationships. With this reservation, 
the following books, among many others, may throw addi- 
tional light on our subject: 


Novels: God of Might by Elias Tobenkin; Daniel Deronda 
by George Eliot; The Moor of Peter the Great by Alexander 
S. Pushkin; God’s Stepchildren by Sarah G. Millin; The Book 
of Esther. 

Plays: All God’s Chillun Got Wings by Eugene O’Neill; 


94 All Colors 


Abie’s Irish Rose by Anne Nichols; Madame Butterfly by 
John Luther Long; Othello by William Shakespeare. | 

The Biographies of Pocahontas, Fred Douglass, Lafcadio 
Hearn. 


A Frew Facts WortH KNowING 


To begin with, here is a brief summary, based on many 
sources, of facts concerning the existence of pure races among 
ourselves: 


The present-day use of the term “race” is almost entirely 
fictitious. Professor Franz Boas and other anthropologists 
have shown that after a generation or two in America, mem- 
bers of different ethnic stocks become so much alike in the 
essentials of physiognomy that they can no longer be dis- 
tinguished, except by their names or other voluntary retention 
of group membership. 


Few of those usually classed as Mulatto are the direct off- 
spring of a white-Negro union. While our census statistics 
describe a large majority of our colored population as Negro, 
in reality those without an admixture of white blood are a 
minority—and even these are not for the most part strictly 
speaking Negroes but belong largely to other African groups. 
In the Rhinelander trial, Judge Mills, counsel for Rhinelander, 
described as “unnatural” the marriage between his client and 
his young wife but also insisted that she was so nearly white 
that his client could not detect her race. 


Few of the Jews you meet in our streets are of Semitic 
countenance or stature—they do not look in the least like 
Arabs and other peoples that are pure Semites. In fact, it is 
impossible for Jews not to have at times mixed their blood 
with that of the peoples among whom they have lived for so 
many centuries. More important, centuries of residence in 
different geographical environments have exposed the Jewish 
people to different factors of selection. 


A page of portraits from the photogravure section of I/ 
Progresso, for all the average person can tell, may represent 
any one of half a dozen East-European nationalities and not 
Italians, 


Husbands and Children 95 


You have probably learned in your Bible class and through 
war drive propaganda to love the Armenians and to hate the 
Turks; but physically there is little difference between them, 
both of the original stocks and others near them have mixed 
over long periods. 


The variety of racial stocks that have gone into the make- 
up of the British people, we have all heard of. And if it be 
contended that, apart from Kelts and Romans, they are, after 
all, in the main Nordic in composition, we are only led to 
study further how and whence the Angles and the Saxons and 
the Danes and the Normans and the Dutch originally came— 
to discover that even prolonged residence around the North 
Sea does not make peoples biologically akin. 


If we try to simplify the matter by recognizing only the 
larger racial roots, then we must confess that the peoples of 
Northern India, though they are dark in complexion, and 
often despised for that reason, are on the whole closer to 
other Aryan groups than, for example, the Magyars of Hun- 
gary who are white but largely intermarried with Mongolian 
peoples. And in the same way, the Riffians are probably more 
closely related to the Spaniards than are the French. 


Race consciousness is not born with us—as is clearly shown 
by the behavior of small children if left uninfluenced. Though 
it is true, as Bryce has said, that “race consciousness sprang 
into life and became the core of nationality” in recent history, 
it is also true that a desire for national unity brings into being 
a fictitious sense of physical kinship. So we hear people 
speak of the kinship between English-speaking peoples as 
though it were a racial one when it is really linguistic. 
Wherever the sense of nationalism is strong, there we must 
expect to find also the myth of racial purity. (A musical critic 
describes Carpenter’s American ballet “Skyscrapers” as hav- 
ing “a distinctively racial quality.’’) If she were to look far 
enough into the roots of her own family tree, every reader 
probably would discover that somewhere or other it has had 
engrafted upon it “alien” blood. It could hardly be other- 
wise. 

*Kight generations back, every one of us had 256 ancestors; thirty 
generations back, every one of us had a million ancestors. It is mathe- 


96 All Colors 


Proressor HotmMsrs TAKES THE STAND 


Here someone may interrupt the trend of the argument and 
say, ‘“Never mind these scientific distinctions. All you have 
proved is that we have made a wrong use of the word ‘race.’ * 
But we know what we mean when we speak of pure or impure 
breeds. Besides, we know that there is a lot of difference in 
the results when we cross breeds that are similar and when 
we cross those that are very dissimilar. Few people, now- 
adays, have serious objections to marriage between people of 
different white nationalities, so long as they are not too differ- 
ent and the match is, in other respects, a good one. What I 
want to know is whether it is quite all right, from the eugenic 
point of view, for an American to marry a Chinese, or for a 
white to marry a Negro, for example.” 

Here we turn to our scientific literature—for example, 
Chapter XV of S. J. Holmes’ Studies in Evolution and Eu- 
genics, or, better still, the theories advanced throughout that 
book, in so far as they bear upon our subject. 

Some readers may be disappointed that this writer is not 
more definite in his final conclusions, some may feel that he is 
too definite, that his actual data do not permit the definiteness 
of his recommendations; and some may feel that he is not 
logical in the presentation of his arguments. Professor Holmes 
will now take the witness stand, and we shall ask him a few 
questions: 

When you say that during the Civil War Mulattoes were 
found inferior to both whites and Negroes in physical strength, 
may not that be due to the fact that a large proportion of 
them were house servants and had other indoor occupations 
while those of pure race were field workers? 


matically certain that every one of us (if white) has descended from 
every sage, hero, knave and poltroon of classical antiquity whose line 
has not died out. 

*For those desirous to follow up this line of inquiry, the following 
book in addition to those mentioned on pp. 93, 94, may prove useful: 
Race Prejudice, by Jean Finot. E. P. Dutton & Co., 1925. Price, 
$3.00. For the most widely endorsed and used classification of races see 
The Racial History of Man, by Roland B. Dixon. Chas, Scribner’s Sons, 
1923. Price, $6.00. 


Husbands and Children 97 


Similarly, when you ascribe the intellectual superiority of 
the Mulatto as compared with the Negro to his white blood, 
are you not forgetting to observe the difference in environ- 
ment? Are not, from the days of slavery to this day, the 
fairer-skinned colored people enjoying more privileged posi- 
tions, and therefore larger prosperity than the very dark ones, 
and does not that give the children of Mulatto homes greater 
cultural advantages, on the whole, than those of pure Negro 
homes? 

Are the abnormally large and outstanding teeth with which 
English people are credited in European caricature due to 
race fusion? Are mixed breeds, because of “inharmonious” 
bone adjustments, on the whole more clumsy and physically 
unfit than those of pure parentage? (Are not the children of 
mixed marriages often the most admired for their beauty, 
agility and prowess in athletics? Does this advantage, if it 
exists, disappear in further generations? ) 


Do you not, in the latter part of Chapter XV, argue as 
though there were pure races that should be preserved when 
in the earlier part you admit that they do not exist? 

You say, let us have restriction on racial intermarriage in 
America until we learn from other parts of the world whether 
race crossings are going to turn out right. May not the rest of 
the world refuse to be our experimental farms—and may not 
the environmental factors in the experiment invalidate the 
conclusions to be drawn from experiences abroad (mostly in 
tropical climates and backward rural societies) for our Ameri- 
can environment? 


In arguing that we must condemn race fusion until we 
know that it is advantageous or harmless, what aim have 
you in view? The welfare of the particular race to which 
you belong, that of civilization as at present understood in 
the western world, or that of all mankind? Can all these 
interests be served simultaneously? 


See whether further reference to this book or to others men- 
tioned on p. 93 provides the answers to these questions. 


98 All Colors 


ANOTHER WITNESS 


For example, we may call upon Julius Drachsler’s Democ- 
racy and Assimilation as our next witness, and more particu- 
larly upon Part II of that book. 

We shall have a few questions to ask our witness, the an- 
swers to which you may be able to discover by reference to 
the book: | 

Does the statement from James Bryce which you quote 
(p. 90) mean that he believed in the heredity of acquired 
characteristics? What evidence is there that different groups 
after coming to America become more like each other without 
intermarriage? Does that mean that people of the same racial 
stock, when transplanted to different parts of the Unted States 
—say Tennessee and Kansas—become unlike each other even 
if there 1s no new race mixture? 

You quote Professor Ross as saying that the new immi- 
grants have “crooked faces, coarse mouths, bad noses, heavy 
jaws, low foreheads, etc.”’ Do they come from less pure racial 
stocks than those who preceded them? Is all this merely a 
matter of esthetic judgments? That is, would a South Ameri- 
can country with largely Portuguese, Spanish and Italian im- 
migration consider that its stock was badly deteriorating if a 
change in the fortunes of Europe brought them large numbers 
of Germans and Scandinavians instead? 

You present the possibility of a psychological blending of 
different racial groups in America as apart from physical 
blending. 


Can two groups become culturally alike and keep ra- 
cially apart? Or would assimilation in the cultural sense 
inevitably lead to the rescinding of such laws and tradi- 
tions as there now are against intermarriage? 


You are comparing the unwillingness of Jews to intermarry 
—because of the difference of religion—with the unwillingness 
of Negroes to intermarry—because of difference in color. Do 
you imply, then, that the factor of color in race fusion is, 


Husbands and Children 99 


like that of religion, a psychological one? Jf the biological 
effects of race fusion were bad, would not an instinctive aver- 
sion have been built up within each group as a warning against 
intermarriage? 

If two thirds of the intermarriages in New York are of 
persons in the higher economic classes, does that mean that 
they have less sense of social responsibility than the masses 
and less regard for the physical and mental efficiency of their 
offspring? 

Supposing the question of biological fusion were, as you 
suggest, left for the decision of each individual and each group 
—would not that mean that the larger national and social in- 
terests in the matter would remain unprotected? Js it wm- 
possible to arrive at a positive national policy on this matter 
of wmtermarriage on the basis of the present state of our 
knowledge? 


WHATEVER THE CAUSE— 


How important such knowledge is for a consistent national 
policy may be illustrated by reference to a recent publication 
of the U. S. Department of Labor, prepared to demonstrate 
the need for including Latin America in the quota provisions 
of the present immigration law.t In it, Professor Robert F. 
Foerster, of Princeton University, relates the subject directly 
to our national policy on immigration. On this matter of the 
mixture of distantly related races he says: 


By far the most usual generalization concerning hybrids 
produced by the union of distant stocks is that they tend to. 
be superior to the poorer strain and inferior to the better) 
strain. The Mexican mestizo, for example, is deemed more) 
capable than the Indian but less capable than the pure Span- 
ish, and the mulatto is deemed more capable than the negro 
but less capable than the white. This observation regarding 
hybrids produced by unions of distant stocks has such wide- 


4 The Racial Problems Involved in Immugration from Latin America 
and the West Indies to the United States. U.S. Department of Labor, 
1925. Superintendent of Documents, Washington, D. C. Price, 10 cents. 


100 All Colors 


spread currency in many countries that it would deserve 
serious consideration as a working hypothesis or as a basis. 
for conservative decision if no more definite knowledge what- 
ever were available. In fact, however, the observation ac- 
cords precisely with the implications of Mendelian heredity— 
the striking of a general av erage between parental stocks on 
the part of their descendants is art what the theory 
demands. 


He answers the criticism that the hybrid is socially in a 
difficult position and that no physical cause need be assumed 
for his inferiority to the dominant group by pointing out that 
this is often not the case in South American countries where 
the hybrid has the opportunity to identify himself with the 
dominant group: 


That he does not play a part both leading and impressive 
to the lay observer is presumably therefore due to a sheer 
and innate want of capacity. 


And this is his general conclusion—so far as our present 
topic 1s concerned: 


Uncertain as it is just how much weight must be accorded 
the environmental explanation of the condition of the half- 
breed (as supplementing the biological explanation), enough 
can be inferred from the condition itself to sustain one con- 
clusion of wide bearing. This conclusion is this: Where a 
race is in a position to maintain its purity it is best that it 
should not breed with what appears to be an inferior or distant 
race. 


That advice, any survey of the literature will show, is 
almost uniformly given by students of the subject. 


How Dors Tuis KNOWLEDGE APPLY? 


Let us now see how the facts that have been brought out— 
especially those that have to do with the contrasts between 
cultural and biological amalgamation—bear upon our personal 
experiences. 


Husbands and Children 101 


To assist the reader’s memory, a letter from a student in 
one of the middle-western universities may be of service: 


A member of my class was looking for an apartment. One 
reply to her advertisement was written on heavy paper with 
a Japanese coat of arms at the top. The letter was written 
in excellent English. Her curiosity was aroused and, although 
she would not live in a house with an Oriental landlord, she 
wanted to find out what sort of place it was. So she called 
and found a charming American girl who was married to a 
Japanese gentleman—a student at the university. 

The young wife told my friend this: “I am completely 
cut off by my family. They are interested in missions and 
have taught me as a child to take an interest in them, too; 
in fact, they gave me an international turn of mind. But 
now that I am in love with this cultured man, simply because 
he is Japanese they will have nothing more to do with me. 
And they claim to be Christians! I will have nothing more 
to do with Christianity.” 

My friend was sorry for her but did not feel that she could 
share the girl’s apartment as she had a Japanese husband. 
I was sorry that she didn’t; for she was missionary-spirited 
and might have helped to right a great wrong. 


Very lkely the reader will think of the Rhinelander case. 
Does it prove that intermarriage in a typical American com- 
munity 1s bound to lead to failure? What part in such 
failure, where we hear of it, 1s played by inherent physical 
and temperamental differences, by differences in the inherited 
social standards, tastes and viewpoints, and by family inter- 
ferences? 


Tue Rexuicious Factor 


Sometimes the discussion of inter-racial marriage tends to 
be confused by consideration of the religious differences be- 
tween husband and wife. As a matter of fact, it is impossible 
wholly to separate the two issues, and the same examples from 
the Bible may be chosen to illustrate the ancient ban on 
intermarriage from either the religious or the racial point 
of view: 


102 All Colors 


We read in the sixth chapter of Genesis how the “sons of 
God,” that is, the sons of Seth, who represented the children 
of faith, married the “daughters of men” who were Cain’s 
descendants and represented the children of unbelief, and from 
these ‘‘mixed marriages” resulted so great a corruption of the 
human race that the deluge was required to cleanse the world. 

Warned perhaps by that disaster, the Patriarchs opposed 
mixed marriages. Abraham, for example, made his servant 
swear by the God of heaven and earth that he would not take 
a wife for Isaac “of the daughters of the Chanaanites” (Gen. 
XXIV:3), but from Abraham’s own country and kindred. 
Isaac in turn laid the same command on his son Jacob, saying, 
“Take not a wife of the stock of Chanaan” (Gen. XXVII:1). 
And when God gave Moses the Ten Commandments on Mount 
Sinai He solemnly forbade any of the Chosen People to “take 
of their (the surrounding pagan nations’) daughters a wife for 
thy son” lest he should fall into idolatry. 

Joshua, too, warned the Israelites: “If you will embrace 
the errors of these nations that dwell among you and make 
marriages with them . . . they shall be a pit and a snare in 
your way and a stumbling-block at your side and stakes in 
your eyes till He take you away and destroy you” (Joshua 
XXIII:12, 13), and in the seventh chapter of Deuteronomy, 
we have the following rigorous prohibition of mixed marriages 
and the unanswerable reason for it: ‘Neither shalt thou make 
marriages with them. Thou shalt not give thy daughter to 
his son, nor take his daughter for thy son: for they will turn 
away thy son from following me, that he may rather serve 
strange gods, and the wrath of the Lord will be kindled and 
will quickly destroy thee.” 

Samson’s blindness, captivity and death resulted from his 
having relations with a Philistine woman instead of marrying 
a Jewish maiden; Solomon, who, though his youth had 
promised so well, in later life turned away to follow strange 
gods through his love for the pagan women he had married; 
and the wicked King Achab chose as his wife Jezabel, a 
Sidonian woman, and then set up an altar to Baal... 


*Courtship and Marriage, by Priests of the Society of Jesus. The 
America Press, New York, 1922. Price 25 cents. p. 48. The Book of 
Ruth has been cited as an early reaction to the ancient Jewish ban on 
intermarriage, and as a plea for more tolerance. 


Husbands and Children 103 


A CHANGE IN ATTITUDE 


Before dismissing this subject of intermarriage, let us look 
at it for a moment from another point of view. One thing 
we notice on glancing through the literature on this topic is 
the relative recentness of the idea that racial intermarriage in 
itself—apart from religious and cultural fusion—is undesir- 
able. Is this due to our increased knowledge of scientific 
facts? Has the increased mobility of people, owing to facilr-— 
ties for cheap travel, brought about a greatly increased in- 
termingling and so, by making common what formerly was 
quite exceptional, aroused concern for the biological outcome? 
Has the higher status of woman now as compared with former 
times perhaps something to do with rt? 


Until modern times—and now in backward countries—it 
has always been taken for granted that when a man married 
a woman from another tribe or clan she would accept the 
traditions of her husband’s family and forget about those of 
her own. 

The Greeks and Romans had no objections to intermarriage, 
so long as the culture of the superior race was dominant in 
the household. Nehemiah thundered against intermarriage 
(XIII:23) because the foreign wives did not teach their chil- 
dren the Jewish language and thus led them away from the 
Jewish religion. 

The Spaniards and the French who pioneered in this 
country did not hesitate to marry native Indian girls. The 
Indians themselves would marry women of other tribes un- 
hesitatingly but sometimes they would burn their blankets, 
moccasins and utensils that might remind the women of their 
former homes and the ideas associated with them. 

Today that sort of thing is no longer done, and a husband 
puts up not only with his wife’s notions of a comfortable home 
but even with her friends. The two mothers-in-law play ‘such 
an important part in modern married life precisely because 
husband and wife have an equal “say” on all important ques- 
tions. If the background is a very different one, the mother- 
in-law tends to be regarded as the chief warrior for the cultural 
standards of the opposite group. 


104 All Colors 


Is there, then, no instinctive dislike to close association be- 
tween those of markedly different race? Is the happiness of. 
some inter-racial marriages explained by an emotional obtuse- 
ness or lack of sensitiveness on the part of one or both of the 
couple? How are we to explain the large illegitimate rela- 
tionship between white men and colored women in states where 
intermarriage 1s prohibited? How do we account for the fact 
that different states look upon different types of inter-racial 
union as unnatural and have prohibited them by law? 


Mrs. Pierce, a light, colored woman, kept a tea garden and 
grill restaurant in a California city, and her business asso- 
ciate was a Japanese artist, Noyoki Ono. The couple decided 
to get married. They appeared before the marriage license 
clerk and asked for a wedding license. He refused: ‘Whites 
and Japs cannot marry in California.” ‘But I’m not ‘white,’ ” 
explained Mrs. Pierce. Three times they applied, and three 
times they were refused, until eventually the clerk was satisfied 
that the woman’s great-great-grandfather had been suspi-’ 
ciously dark. The couple came east for their honeymoon, 
which they spent in a white hotel in Virginia: Mrs. Ono 
looked white and Mr. Ono was yellow, and Virginia has no laws 
against this particular race. 


Is physical revulsion or instinctive dislike abolished where 
the woman is of a recognizedly lower status than the man? 
Is there likely to be less miscegenation between races that 
recognize each other as equal? 


Racr SUPERIORITY 


This brings us to the question of racial superiority and 
inferiority into which we cannot here go very deeply: The 
reader will do well, however, to refer for reliable data on 
this subject to Chapter IV of Kroeber’s Anthropology. (See 
page 93.)? 

*¥For further details see The Crisis for F ebruary, 1926, p. 194. 

* A full discussion outline on this subject, in four parts, is given in 
The Inquiry for March, 1926, under the title, “Superior People.” Copies 


of it may be obtained from the office of the Inquiry, 129 East 52d 
Street, New York, at ten cents each, or $1.00 per dozen. 


Husbands and Children 105 
What is racial superiority? 


Can we separate the biological from the cultural factors in 
the make-up of a racial group—that is, the qualities from 
birth and the qualities acquired through the influence of the 
environment (including not only climate and topography but 
also occupations and the political and economic relations of 
the group to other groups)? 

Are our general ideas of the superiority or inferiority of a 
race or nationality based upon all that is known of its history 
or only upon a few chapters from it—and perhaps even of 
these only fragments? For example, tfi you think of the 
Chinese in this connection, do you think of great city and 
empire builders and hundreds of generations of artists and 
philosophers, or do you think only of the starving millions 
of the famine areas, or perhaps of the Chinese coolies who 
work for a pittance in foreign lands? When you speak of 
Anglo-Saxon superiority, do you really mean the none too 
glorious pages of Anglo-Saxon history proper, or do you mean 
the whole of British history with its Scotch, Roman, Danish, 
Norman, and more recent immigrant elements? 

Are you thinking of the achievements of races or of those 
of ndividuals? When you think of Germans, do you think 
of an ancient people of peasants and woodsmen or of long 
lines of poets, musicians, philosophers or emperors? Are the 
Itahan people to you the imperial people of Rome, the artisan 
folk of the Renaissance, the half-starved peasants of the early 
Nineteenth century or the sturdy though ignorant builders of 
American railroads? 1 

Have you ever heard of a racial group that did not claim 
for itself superiority over others in at least some respects? 


By what standards are we to measure the superiority of 
one group over another? 


* For a further discussion of this theme, see William James’ essay on 
Great Men and Their Environment in The Will to Believe and Other 
Essays. Longmans, Green and Co., 1897. Price, $2.75. 


106 All Colors 


Supposing we wanted to arrange the members of any group 
of women we knew in the order of their relative superiority 
—how should we go about it? Would we choose good looks 
first? Physical strength? Intelligence? General ability as 
measured by quick wits and “always doing the right thing at 
the right time?” Taste? Popularity with men (which would 
only mean that we should have to start all over again trying 
to find out how men judge the desirable qualities of girls)? 

Have you been told that certain racial groups are ofi in- 
herently inferior intelligence to others? On what basis of 
examination are such statements made? Is it possible to dis- 
tinguish native intelligence from the result of early influences 
and home environment? 


Here is a summary statement of one of the most recent 
studies in this field, made in a country where children of 
widely different races attend the same schools: 


One should not attach too much importance to differences 
in native capacity to learn. Each race has its individuals 
of high grade mental ability and others who are inferior. The 
average between two races is much less than the difference 
between the superior tenth and the inferior tenth of any one 
race. Differences in native capacity are so intimately asso- 
ciated with differences in interests, incentives and attitudes 
which are socially conditioned, that it is extremely difficult, if 
not impossible, to make a trustworthy comparison of two races 
as to native ability. Often differences that are taken to be 
native are in fact differences which have come from cultural 
tradition or from the practical circumstances of life. 


*'We hear a good deal about the lack of beauty among the newer 
groups of American immigrants compared with the older stocks, and 
this is often talked about as though there were objective standards. 
Compare this paragraph from a recent book by a Tibetan woman, 
Mrs. Louis M. King (Rin-Chan Lha-Mo), We Tibetans (quoted in the 
New York Times for March 26, 1926.) “Westerners are not good 
looking according to our standards. Your noses are too big and often 
stick out like kettle spouts; your ears are too large, like the pig’s ears; 
your eyes are blue like children’s marbles; your eyesockets are too deep 
and your eyebrows too prominent—too simian.” 


Husbands and Children 107 


(The table given in the pamphlet shows that in the per- 
centage of children retarded in the public schools of Hawaii 
there are not only great differences for racially similar groups 
but also for the same racial group in town and country.)+ 


Wuat Arg Our STANDARDS? 


When we speak of superiority and inferiority of races— 
do we have in mind what pleases us personally? The welfare 
of the community? If the latter, what community—the one 
to which more particularly we belong, the state, the nation, 
humanity at large? Can we be positive about the superiority 
of one individual over another in certain respects—say musical 
ability? Can we be equally positive when we compare whole 
races? Or do our authorities indicate that the differences be- 
tween them are marginal—that is to say, the great* majority 
of whites and Negroes, for example, come within the same 
range of intelligence, but there are more white people above 
that range than Negroes and more Negroes below that range 
than whites? ? 

In other words, when we hear of a marriage between a white 
and a colored person, can we be sure that the one will be 
more intelligent than the other? May it be the other way 
round in some cases? * 


*Romanzo Adams and T. M. Livesay, The Peoples of Hawaiv. 
Pamphlet. Institute of Pacific Relations, Honolulu, 1925, pp. 32-33. 

*Interesting diagrammatic representations of this point may be found 
in Population Problems by Edward Byron Reuter, J. B. Lippincott Co., 
1923. Price, $2.00. Chapter X XI, p. 321; and in Whither Bound in Mis- 
sions by Daniel Johnson Fleming, Association Press, 1925. Price, $2.00. 
Chapter I, p. 18. These diagrams, of course, can only deal with such 
measurable qualities as intelligence or physical strength and are of no 
value in determining the relative amount of racial “superiority” or 
“inferiority.” 

* Since reference has already been made to the Harvard case of race 
discrimination—see p. 16—the following quotation of the dignified 
letter of protest by Roscoe Conkling Bruce, father of the Negro student, 
may be of interest. It is to the point in the present connection: 

“However unpopular the Jew, the Irishman and the Negro may be 
in certain minds and certain sections and at certain times, the fact 
remains that the distribution of human excellence in each of these 
races, as in the case of every other race, begins at zero and ends at 
infinity. 


108 All Colors 


In places where a study has been made of white-Negro 
marriages, it has been found that marriages between white 
men and Negro women are more frequent than between Negro 
men and white women. Where a white woman marries a 
colored man, it is most frequently a girl who has gone through 
a good deal of trouble and has few friends. The typical case 
would be that of a white woman of that sort, doing one menial 
job after another until, by chance, she finds in some hotel or 
restaurant where she is working a colored waiter or fellow 
servant doing little kindnesses for her. She gets to like him 
and, in her loneliness, finally consents to marry the one man, 
perhaps, who has not treated her “like dirt.” 


How are we going to get at this matter of racial superi- 
ority? Must we first decide “superiority for what?” Is 
the ability of a group to survive in itself a claim to su- 
periority? 


Let us again look up one of the authorities named earlier 
in this chapter: Chapter XIII of Ellsworth Huntington’s 
The Character of Races. What does this author tell us about 
the survival value of human qualities under different environ- 
mental circumstances? 


If not survival, what is the test of racial superiority we 
are going to adopt? Supposing we choose high mentahty— 
may we not get with it a large predisposition to tuberculosis? 


Can we have a satisfactory criterion of racial superior- 
ity until we know what sort of human society we desire? 


“The differences in racial excellence consist in the comparative num- 

_ bers of individuals to be found in the higher reaches of the vast curve 

upward of human quality and serviceability. And to assess the relative 

\ values of the several stocks of mankind en masse is, one must concede, 
an exceedingly delicate and difficult, indeed perilous, task. 

“Who shall proscribe a Straus, a Plunkett or a Douglass because of 
his race? The particular individual may be a personality of charm 
and power and prospect absolutely apart from the theoretical frequency 
of inferiorities in the race. From kindergarten to university, I would 
fain believe, the spirit of education approaches children and youths as 
individuals, not as racial symbols. Even courts of law deal with men 
upon their ascertained merits as individuals. Shall a world-famed 
nursery of the humanities be less humane?” 


Husbands and Children 109 


Is there a general eugenic ideal that we can all accept? 
In other words, before we can answer the question what sort of 
husbands we want our girl friends to have, and what sort of 
wives our boy friends, must we not know what qualities we 
shall most want in their children? And can we know that 
unless we also have a fairly defimte ideal for the future of our 
country and for the world into which the children of tomorrow 
will have to fit? 


And here we may well leave off in order to proceed, in our 
next chapter, to a consideration of race relations in the light 
of political, economic and cultural world relationships in which 
the biological factor is but one of many that will shape the 
future of mankind. 


CHAPTER VI 


Nation and Mankind 


Practical reformers who like to discuss social problems from 
the standpoint of their own concern in them are sometimes 
accused of taking too narrow a view. Their provincialism and 
their smallness are assailed, and they defend themselves as 
best they can against this charge by saying that all they are 
trying to do is to get hold of those angles of world-wide prob- 
lems about which they can do something. We are not averse 
to traveling anywhere in time or space where we can get fresh 
light upon the things we are concerned about—but in the end 
we wish to return and tackle them from the corner where we 
are. 

The point at which we arrived at the end of the last chapter 
left us a good distance away from that corner, as it happens. 
Through one thing and another we got to the place where we 
felt the need of a more definite conviction as regards the kind 
of folks with whom we would want to people the world, if we 
could manage the matings between racial groups. But we saw 
that we could not make up our minds on that until we had 
a more definite idea of the sort of world we wanted them to 
live in. We all know how irritating “superior people” can be 
at times in circumstances where their particular kind of superi- 
ority does not count; and it 1s the same with “superior races.” 
We found that some of the anthropologists and other scientists 
were telling us about superior and inferior races as though we 
were all agreed upon fundamental definitions—which we are 
not. Concretely, before we can be sure what races to admit 
into this country or into marriage relations with white Ameri- 
cans, and against which of them we ought to erect further 
barriers, we must consider, it seems, what sort of country we 

110 


Nation and Mankind 111 


want to make of this. And in that very phrase lies con- 
troversy: 


The New American frequently asserts hotly that America 
is still “in the making,” and that as yet there is no real 
American nationality or civilization. Not long ago a promi- 
nent member of an East European racial group stated: ‘This 
country is not a ‘nation.’ It is a gathering together of peoples 
from every corner of the earth. No one racial group, no matter 
how early settled in this country, can furnish more than one 
note in this vast symphony of peoples.” To hear some of these 
alien protests, one would think that America had no history, 
no traditions, no coherent fabric of civilization, but that all of 
us had been dumped down together at Ellis Island a few short 
years ago. 

Do you agree? Is it nonsense to talk about “America in 
the making”? Is America already made in all essentials— 
a nation as clearly defined by its history, racial make-up, 
traditions, tastes, qualities for good or bad, as any nation in 
Europe? What do you consider some of the major charac- 
teristics of America (meaning, of course, the United States) 
today? How did we acquire (or how did those strains in the 
population that you look upon as “typically” American ac- 
quire) the characteristics which you consider American? 


Can we separate the biological from the environmental 
influences? Has white America been influenced by colored 
America? 


Here is a prediction from William Benjamin White’s The 
Color Line, published in 1905: 


The gift of song, of the plaintive Negro melody—we freely 
allow it. How much of the same is really the product of the 
Negro soul, seems to be a question by no means easy to 
answer. But let us allow the Negroid the benefit of the doubt 
and accord him the fullest credit. We are not musician enough 
to appraise this “gift” properly, nor yet to reckon its possible 


Lothrop Stoddard, Racial Realities in Europe, Charles Scribner’s 
Sons, 1924. Price, $3.00, p. 242. 


112 All Colors 


significance for the future of American music. But at the 
very most, it seems to us that this worth and this significance 
cannot be very high. 


Do you agree with this appraisal? Do you think the Negro 
has affected American art, speech, taste, character? Do you 
think the American Indian has affected the American char- 
acter? 


CuLtTuRE Fusion Witruout Race Fusion 


It would be instructive to trace the effect of our contacts 
and relationships with the Indian as affecting the development 
of what is most distinctive in American citizenship and char- 
acter. 

Certain Indian traits and qualities—those of physical cour- 
age and endurance, of silence and stoicism under conditions 
of danger and difficulty, of a certain unassailable personal 
dignity—have for a hundred years unquestionably so affected 
the American mind as to have entered very deeply into the 
quality of what we may call American personality. If all our 
pioneers were not at some time engaged in Indian fighting, 
they were all schooled in the need of being prepared for it. 
Outside of our eastern cities, every American boy until within 
a very recent period has been trained in the use of arms, has 
had some knowledge of wild animals, and woodcraft, and has 
imbibed something of that personal initiative, resourcefulness, 
and capacity for self-directed action that could not have come 
alone from our early provisions for democratic equality and 
universal education. It came in large part from the experience 
of subduing a great continent and from the actual or tradi- 
tional dealings of our people with so remarkable a man as the 
American Indian. 


Thus Albert Shaw 1—reminding us that even a traditional 
enmity may be relationship enough profoundly to affect na- 
tional character. Can we still look upon the America we 


* Political Problems of American Development. Columbia University 
Press, 1907. p. 41. 


Nation and Mankind 113 


know as the pure embodiment of a spirit inherited with the 
blood of European ancestors? 


Can the cultural heritage of a majority group be kept 
“pure” in the presence of a minority? 

Is it correct to call America Protestant? Puritan? 
Democratic? To what extent must a whole nation corre- 
spond to a descriptive epithet to justify its use? Can 
it be true both that America has definite, established, 
recognizable characteristics, such as those named, and also 
that it is a nation in the making? Is perhaps this idea 
of “in the making” one of the specific characteristics 
_ which belong in the picture—a progressivism that scorns 
the safety of established traditions but prefers to go on 
pioneering even after every bit of continental territory 
has been settled? 


Can we, perhaps, answer this question as to American char- 
acter by looking at what seem to be the most characteristic 
American contributions to civilization? Must all of America 
share those characteristics to justify our calling them 
American? 

Can we recognize a personality only by seeing all of it in 
all its history from the cradle to the grave—or may a striking 
gesture on a striking occasion fix it sufficiently to be recog- 
nized by it? On the other hand, is there a danger that by 
taking the part for the whole, by taking, for example, the 
Gettysburg address for the whole Lincoln, we shall masread 
the character of a person? 

Is there a similar danger that by emphasizing certain traits 
in the history and present nature of a people we may create 
a wholly false picture of it? For example, by always think- 
ing of New England as Protestant and Puritan, forgetting its 
large Catholic population, or by thinking of the South as a 
region of large landed estates, forgetting the much more nu- 
merous small farms, or of Spanish-speaking populations in 
the Southwest as an immigrant intrusion upon a Protestant- 
Nordic settlement when as a matter of fact the Spaniards 


114 All Colors 


were in possession of those lands for many generations before 
the first pioneers of North-European stock arrived? 


National character, like racial character, is largely fictitious 
—and for the same reason: circumstances alter cases. The 
democratic people of one era may become an imperialistic 
one in another. Puritanism, due to the exigencies of the 
climate, and of the occupations and way of life which it de- 
termines, may survive in some parts of the country but much 
less so in others, though the stock remains the same. Neither 
the inherited racial qualities of the stock alone nor the features 
of the geographical environment alone determine the character 
of a people, but the way in which these forces and other in- 
fluences from outside interplay. 


METAL AND Dross IN THE MELTING Por 


Have the racial groups that have come from Europe in the 
last two decades or so been different 1n general character, 
taking them altogether, from those which came earlier? Are 
they recruited from lower strata of the population than immi- 
grants were formerly? 


This is what a well-known American statesman says: 


Those who come hither are generally the most stupid of 
their own nation, and as ignorance is often attended with great 
credulity . . . it is almost impossible to remove any prejudice 
they may entertain. Not being used to liberty, they know 
not how to make modest use of it. . . . Unless the stream of 
importation could soon be turned from this into other chan- 
nels, they will soon outnumber us; all the advantages we have 
will not be able to preserve our language, and even our govern- 
ment will become precarious. 


And this is what a labor newspaper has to say about these 


| newcomers: 


Capital is striving to fill the country with foreign workmen 


\whose abject condition in their own country has made them 


Nation and Mankind 115 


tame, submissive and “peaceable, orderly citizens,” that is, f 
work fourteen and sixteen hours per day, for what capital \ 


sees fit to give them. 


So it does seem, does it not, that the human raw material 
we get from abroad is getting worse? But this has been a little 


joke on you: The first quotation is from a speech made in | 
1753 by Benjamin Franklin to the legislature of Pennsylvania | 
concerning the Germans of Philadelphia, and the second from | 


a labor paper published in 1845 concerning English workmen! 
And if you look up old books, you will find similar expressions 
by the “best people” in every era—because the latest immi- 
grant groups somehow always look more uncouth and unde- 
sirable than those whose representatives have been among us 
in any number for a long time. 

Alas, our ability to draw up a bill of specifications for 
the typical American (so that we may admit to the country 
and, especially, to the marriage relationship only those some- 
where near their fulfilment) is dwindling; and we must fall 
back upon other tests of eligibility. What do you suggest? 


Should we think, in the first place, of the political and 
economic future of those already in America—whatever their 
origin? 


Is our first responsibility to ourselves as a people? 


This is how James Bryce has put the question: 3 


Has a state any right to forbid entrance to harmless for- 
eigners of any particular race or to make the color of their skin 
a ground for exclusion? Upon this subject two doctrines have 
been advanced. One, which found favor two generations ago, 
held that prima facie every human being has a natural right to 
migrate from any one part of the world to any other, the 
world being the common inheritance of mankind, and that only 
very special conditions can justify the exclusion of any par- 
ticular race or class of men. The other doctrine is that each 
State is at all times free to exclude any foreigners from enter- 


* International Relations. Macmillan Co., 1922. Price, $2.50. p. 127. 


116 All Colors 


ing any part of its territory, and that no ground for complaint 
on the part of any other States arises from such exclusion, 
unless where a foreign State claims that its own citizens are 
being discriminated against either in breach of treaty rights or 
in a way calculated to wound its national susceptibilities. 

Now which of these doctrines is right? The White Races 
have used both as each suited their convenience. The former 
doctrine justified the white man’s conquests in new countries 
which were thinly peopled by savage or backward tribes, un- 
able to use the resources Nature provided. Such races were 
either subjugated, or possibly exterminated, by Spaniards, 
Dutch, French, English or Russians; and the title by prior 
occupation which any of these nations acquired was subse- 
quently disturbed only when some stronger white State ejected 
the first white occupiers, as England ejected Spain from 
Jamaica and the United States ejected Spain from the 
Philippines. 


Has this country a right to exclude all or some of those 
who would enter and share its resources? 


Are these purely “domestic” questions—that is to say, ques- 
tions concerning which there can be no covenanting with other 
nations? 





Rancor Towarp NoNE—EXCEPT 


Let us look at the matter for a few minutes from the point 
of view of a country that has come but lately within the orb 
of world intercourse and trade, after all available areas for 
expansion had been taken up by other nations and their 
colonies. 

First, we will hear a friendly outsider on the action recently 
taken by this country in curtly informing Japan that the 
matter of our immigration restrictions was entirely our own 
business and that we would not have Japanese immigrants 
on the same terms as others, even if that meant an annual 
addition to their number of only about two hundred. H. G. 
Wells, in an editorial, said: 


Nation and Mankind 117 


It is not a question of excluding cheap labor or alien mass 
immigration; that has been fairly well done for some time. 
It is an intolerable assertion that individual educated Japanese 
are unfitted by race and culture for helpful participation in 
the high civilization of the Pacific Coast. It implies that 
Japanese and Americans are forever incompatible, are forever 
two peoples; that forever on this planet their destinies are to 
be worked out parallel or apart—or to mingle only in bitter 
conflict for exclusive survival, These are immensely danger- 
ous implications. 


And now let us remind ourselves of a passage by a famous 
American in a document often quoted on a related matter but 
with seeming forgetfulness for the applicability of some of its 
sentences to our own time and to this specific question of 
our relationship with Japan. In George Washington’s Fare- 
well Address we read: 


Nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate 
antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attach- 
ments for others, should be excluded and that, in place of 
them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be culti- 
vated. The nation which indulges towards another an habitual 
hatred, or an habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave. 

Antipathy in one nation against another disposes each more 
readily to offer insult and injury, to lay hold of slight causes 
of umbrage, and to be haughty and intractable when acci- 
dental or trifling occasions of dispute occur. Hence frequent 
collisions, obstinate, envenomed, and bloody contest. The 
nation, prompted by ill-will and resentment, sometimes impels 
to war the government, contrary to the best calculations of 
policy. The government sometimes participates in the national 
propensity, and adopts through passion what reason would 
reject... . 


Is the attitude that now prevails toward Japan in line with 
the country’s earlier tradition? Is hostility to the Japanese 
due to the fact that, more than other people, they threaten 
American economic or racial standards? Would friendship 
urith Japan (not the superficial one of diplomatic language 


118 All Colors 


merely) be an asset for the future of America? Is a fight, 
some time, with the yellow races, under the leadership of 
Japan, “inevitable”? 


THE QUESTION OF OVERPOPULATION 


Obviously, a thorough study of problems of population would 
lead us too far away from the subject of race relations in 
which we are primarily concerned. But we cannot altogether 
leave this subject out of sight since it so intimately bears 
upon the migrations of peoples. Hence we shall again turn 
to a few authorities for help. The following books, more 
especially, are suggested as dealing each of them with a dis- 
tinct and important aspect of the matter in hand: 


Mankind at the Crossroads by Edward M. East. Charles 
Scribner’s Sons, 1923. Price $3.50. Especially Chapters IV, 
V and XII (and all references to the population problems 
of Japan). 

Population Problems by Edward Byron Reuter. J. B. Lip- 
pincott Co., 1923. Price $2.00. Especially Chapters XVIII 
to XXI. 

Races, Nations and Classes by Herbert Adolphus Miller. 
J. B. Lippincott Co., 1924. Price $2.00. Especially Chap- 
ters XV and XVI. 


What, according to Professor East, are the main population 
problems of Japan? Are these problems unique? In what 
parts of the world do we find similar problems? Would emi- 
gration to North and South America in the long run lessen 
the population pressure upon Japan? Has emigration in the 
last half century helped Italy? Has it helped Ireland? Sup- 
posing every country had a free outlet for its surplus popula- 
tion, would that help the progress of world civilization? 

What is the connection between size of population and prog- 
ress? Is there at the present time a problem of world-over- 
population? What constitutes overpopulation? What are 
some of the factors, today, which did not exist in the past, 


Nation and Mankind 119 


that are making for larger or less interrupted population 
growth? What are some of the factors making for decline 
of population? Are these tendencies evident under different 
sets of circumstances, as exemplified by different countries? 
If so, what are some of these circumstances? 


Now we will put Professor Reuter on the witness stand 
and inquire a little about the larger problem for the United 
States as that author sees it—especially if there are points 
on which he differs from the opinions of Professor East, or 
where he lays a different emphasis on the recognized factors 
in the situation. 


Is there a shortage of| cultivable land on this continent, or 
danger of it? How do we estimate the probable growth of 
population? How far has the desire for a steadily growing 
population been fostered by those who are thinking of the 
fighting power of the state? 


Supposing we admitted for the moment that the United 
States as a nation has the right to frame its population 
policies, including the regulation of immigration, marriage 
laws, etc., according to the probable future needs of its 
own present population, would that make possible a policy 
upon which all Americans recognizing that right could 
agree? Or could it be adopted only by disregarding the 
natural desires of large racial minorities in America? 


For example, would the descendants of Southern and Eastern 
European countries agree to a permanent regulation of immi- 
gration that favors the addition of new stock from northern 
countries? Would the twelve million colored people be likely 
to feel that it 1s wmmaterial to them from what races the 
population of the country is to recruit its additions? 


Is the fear of overpopulation—leading to demands for 
further restriction of immigration—merely a rationaliza- 
tion of race prejudice? Is it fear merely that the unusu- 


120 All Colors 


/ ally high American standard of living, compared with 
those ruling elsewhere, may be somewhat lowered, or is it 
fear of real starvation? 

Do you believe that American wage standards, and the 
kind of life they make possible, should be maintained at 
all possible costs, even that of enmity on the part of other 
peoples? Can the progress of the world best be advanced 
by trying to achieve on this continent, through such meas- 
ures as may be necessary, a higher type of civilization than 
as yet attained anywhere? 


May this be a temporary condition—that is, must we for 
some time develop ourselves and our type of civilization before 
we can be of largest value to the rest of the world? At what 
point shall we consider that we have reached a sufficient degree 
of self-development and may now help others? Can we 
peacefully pursue this path of self-development within a suf- 
fering and hostile world? 


We will now turn to Races, Nations and Classes and see 
whether Professor Miller’s studies of majority and minority 
psychology in the life of the nations throw any light on the 
questions just discussed. What does he say about patriotism, 
for example, in relation to democratic ideals for all humanity? 
What, according to this author, will be the probable reaction 
within our country itself if we insist on regarding a certain 
traditional, racial, religious, cultural type as the only repre- 
sentative American and accordingly treat all other types as 
intruders? 


Supposing that this process of hardening our conception of 
the meaning of America were greatly to increase, what would 
be its effect upon the millions of colored people in America 
and their relation to the whites? Would it mean the building 
up, side by side, of two absolutely separate civilizations, one 
white and one colored? Would it necessitate the country get- 
ting rid, in one way or another, of its largest racial minority? 


Nation and Mankind 121 


THREE PROGRAMS FOR THE NEGRO 


Here are three widely held opinions as to the future of the 
American Negro: 


1. We must settle the Negro problem once for all, and to 
do this we have no recourse other than to return the Negro 
to his homeland. 

We of this generation have thought but little upon this, 
the sole possibility of solving the Negro problem. But we 
shall see that the removal of the American Negro to the home 
of his ancestors will work to the advantage of the Negro as 
well as be in keeping with the necessity of Caucasians... . 

If the Negro remains in the United States, and does not 
amalgamate with the Caucasian, he is to be submitted to an 
increasing intensity of competition before which he cannot 
hold his own. 

2. The future of race relations, in so far as they are not 
allowed to degenerate into violence and irremediable bitter- 
ness, would seem to lie with labor and with liberal political 
forces that represent working-class sentiment as the old parties 
do not and cannot. It will largely be on the job and in the 
labor union that the identity of interest of the colored worker 
and the white will be demonstrated, probably despite all 
efforts to maintain the color line in industry by using unor- 
ganized colored men to break strikes.? 


Do you believe that Negro-white relations in America will 
eventually settle themselves through purely economic influ- 
ences, as surmised by the author just quoted? 


3. It is often stated that when two races have lived side by 
side in the same area, under the same government, history 


*Whate America, by Earnest Sevier Cox. White America Society, 
Richmond, Va., 1923; price, $2.00. A book that works out in detail 
a plan for “repatriation” of the American Negro in Africa and the 
arguments for it. p. 335. 

This type of argument, it will be noted, has regard only to the African 
and not at all to the European part of the ancestry of America’s colored 
population; moreover it forgets that this ancestry has on an average 
been in longer residency on this continent than that of the rest of us. 

*The Negro Faces America. By Herbert J. Seligmann. Harper & 
Brothers, 1920. Price, $1.00. p. 302. 


122 All Colors 


has recorded only three results—extermination of the weaker, 
slavery, or amalgamation. Many people, therefore, think that 
' only these three are possible. . . . These people overlook the 
/ success of the Jews and Gypsies in maintaining racial integ- 
rity in many lands. No one affirms that the preservation of 
racial integrity of the Jew is a denial of democratic principles. 
Democracy does not demand the fusion of races any more than 
it demands the fusion of religions. _ ! 

Nor does history offer as a precedent any nation including 
two groups so numerous and so widely divergent in physical 
characteristics and position in the cultural scale as the white 
man and the Negro in the United States. Again, at no time 
recorded in history has such a wealth of spiritual and intellec- 
tual effort been directed toward the cultivation of satisfactory 
race relations as today. These conditions may make it possi- 
ble for the ten million Negroes and the hundred odd million 
white people to dwell peacefully together without the tre- 
mendous social cost of amalgamation, each making its own 
peculiar contribution to the development of the United States. 


Contrast the philosophies involved in these three programs. 
Which of them seems to you the most promising? Which of 
them falls in most with your desires as to the future of 
American Negro-white relations in their bearing on world 
relations? 

We have singled out the most consequential part of the 
American race problem, that of Negro-white relations, for a 
separate consideration of proposed solutions—only to find that 
there is much dissent among the counsellors. Moreover, it is 
not possible to treat that part of the problem without refer- 
ence to others. In some parts of the country the situation 
as between native white Americans and those of Spanish and 
Indian descent, or between natives and foreign-born, is equally 
acute. America’s attitude toward the Negro is taken by other 
peoples and races as symbolical of its attitude toward all the 
non-white races of the world. Among white, native Ameri- 
cans, attitudes first fostered toward Negroes are apt to be 
transferred to other races—even to the darker portions of the 


*The Basis of Racial Adjustment. By Thomas Jackson Woofter, Jr., 
Ginn & Co., 1925. Price, $1.40. p. 3. 


Nation and Mankind 123 


white race itself. For these reasons, and others, none of the 
questions raised in this chapter can be answered without refer- 
ence to many related questions. 

As on the matter of race fusion, so on the matter of popula- 
tion policy and the part of the different branches of mankind 
in the building up of an economic world society, science leaves 
us without sure guidance. Among the intricacy of motives 
and interests we still have to seek a unifying principle, or at 
least a unifying psychological atmosphere within which it will 
be possible to deal with specific difficulties as they come along. 
In the absence of a final verdict, can there be any doubt what 
that atmosphere should be? Are we to live in fear and 
jealousy and hate or in neighborliness and good-will? Is it 
easier for us to keep an open mind toward the scientific 
discoveries of the future—and the changes in personal be- 
havior and social policy they may point to—in a state of 
nervous group exclusiveness or in a state of friendly mingling 
with people of all sorts? 


CONCLUSIONS 


In this last chapter we have gone to the scientists to get, 
if not final answers, at least presumable facts upon which 
we might rely in giving our answers to perplexing questions 
of inter-racial conduct. But instead of getting our answers 
or even agreement on major truths, we have had opened up 
to us vistas of new areas that await exploration. 

Hitherto, when science failed to answer our questions, we 
have fallen back upon religious or patriotic precepts in such 
a way as to provide us with sanctions for the way out of the 
problem which suited us best or seemed to us most probably 
right. In doing this we have confused the issue with plausible 
maxims that were supposed to be too sacred for pragmatic 
tests. There was no answer to the demand that ours be for all 
time “a white man’s country,” or to the demand for ‘“Chris- 
tian brotherhood.” But neither phrase has given us a satis- 
factory working principle because its content had no relation 
to our experience of the problem in its concrete manifestations. 


124 All Colors 


In the present studies we have followed a different course 
which at this point it may be worth while to recall: We 
started out with a situation, such as might occur almost any 
time anywhere—the controversy over Lucy’s birthday party. 
(p. 7 et seq.) We talked it over in detail and, at the end of 
our analysis, defined our aim as the discovery of ways in a 
given situation “whereby as time goes on all the essential and 
best considered purposes will become progressively realized in 
forms that are satisfactory to everybody concerned. We shall 
need the will to seek such ways and the patience to think out 
methods that will work.” We have followed that example with 
a number of other practical situations in race relations. And, 
indeed, we might have been in danger of getting lost in a mass 
of detail were it not for our consciousness in dealing with 
each new problem or difficulty that we were gradually acquir- 
ing skill in more than one way: We learned to come to grips 
with the actual issue more quickly and accurately; we dis- 
covered features which it had in common with other issues 
that required action; we gradually clarified for ourselves the 
more fundamental problems of race relations in the light of 
which the particular issue was often seen to be nothing more 
than a passing difficulty. At the risk of losing ourselves in a 
multitude of details, we escaped the greater and more preva- 
lent danger of making a few large and well-sounding phrases 
do service for honest-to-goodness practical solutions. ‘Send 
them all to the country they came from”; “let your heart be 
your guide”; “deal with the issue in Christian kindliness”; 
“equality of opportunity but not social equality”; ‘the golden 
rule’”—these and similar maxims, bandied about between dis- 
putants, may provide good exercise in verbal fencing, but they 
do not help Lucy and her mother. 

Some of us, no doubt, set out in the hope that we might 
discover a formula large enough to satisfy our ideals and at 
the same time meet the requirements of all possible situations. 
Instead, the homely facts of everyday life refused to come into 
the fold of even the most inclusive generalization; they con- 
tinue, and will always continue, to test our resourcefulness, our 
imagination, our tact, our courage. But we did discover a new 


Nation and Mankind 125 


satisfaction where we had hardly looked for it—in the process 
of our quest itself. This gave us not only an orderly method 
for a way out of problems in conduct—in itself a reassuring 
factor—but a new faith in the power of thought. If we have 
applied ourselves at all seriously to the progressive steps of 
this adventure in common study, we shall also have come out 
with a new respect for human experience as a serviceable 
guide in itself. The dogmatist may ardently ride through 
all the inherited traditions of his own and of other peoples; 
but when we have traced popular attitudes to their roots, we 
often discover homely wisdom even in those conventions with 
which we least agree. And so, instead of ruling out opinions 
that conflict with ours, we try to evaluate them and to evaluate 
our own afresh in their light. Thus we also lose our fear of 
conflict, even of our own inner conflicts, learning to look upon 
them as an opportunity for the adjustment of interests and 
viewpoints that spring from different experiences, and as the 
budding of new truth. 

At present there is no final goal in race relations toward 
which we must work. We cannot substitute one single ideal, 
one single loyalty, for the many that make up the richness 
and variety of life. 


The modern world has suffered because in so many matters 
philosophy has offered it only an arbitrary choice between hard 
and fast opposites: Disintegrating analysis or rigid synthesis; 
complete radicalism, neglecting and attacking the historic past 
as trivial and harmful, or complete conservatism idealizing 
institutions as embodiments of eternal reason; a resolution of 
experience into atomic elements that afford no support to 
stable organization or a clamping down of all experience by 
fixed categories and necessary concepts—these are the alterna- 
tives that conflicting schools have presented. .. . 

A philosophic reconstruction which should relieve men of 
having to choose between an impoverished and truncated ex- 
perience on one hand and an artificial and impotent reason 
on the other would relieve human effort from the heaviest 
intellectual burden it has to carry. It would eliminate the 
division of men of good will into two hostile camps. It would 


126 All Colors 


permit the codperation of those who respect the past and the 
institutionally established with those who are interested in es- 
tablishing a freer and happier future. For it would determine 
the conditions under which the funded experience of the past 
and the contriving intelligence which looks to the future can 
effectually interact with each other.* 


This “philosophic reconstruction,” the need for which has 
become so evident in our grappling with great ethical issues, 
is taking place today through just such studies as we have 
here attempted. It does not mean the subjection of the re- 
ligious convictions with which we started to scientific knowl- 
edge, or the subjection of scientific truth to a system of belief, 
but a new synthesis through the process of dealing with the 
realities of daily life. It is true, we need an emotional impetus 
other than any of which we are normally conscious to help 
us through difficult problems in human relations; but we look 
for its source within ourselves and our problems. In all our 
striving for effective adjustment of group conflict we shall 
increasingly become aware of spiritual strength as we pene- 
trate through the superficial incidents to the deeper signifi- 
cance of our tasks. 


SUMMARY OF REMAINING QUESTIONS 


So, we now come to the summing up of the questions which 
our studies have left open: 

What have we learned that will affect our thinking and our 
doing on problems of race relations henceforth? 

1. What more do we need to know to be sure of our prin- 
ciples or of appropriate ways of applying them? 

This may mean a program of reading and study, possibly 
of continued discussions, and even of incipient research—by 
each of us according to our individual opportunities or by tak- 
ing part in some larger project of inquiry that may promise 
to bring light into dark phases of the subject. 


* John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, Henry Holt & Co., 1920. 
p. 99 et seq. 


Nation and Mankind 127 


2. What social programs may we sponsor, engineer, take 
part in, to bring about happier inter-racial relations? 

We shall have to think of the agencies already available 
and, maybe, needing our help. Above all, we shall have to 
think of our more immediate responsibilities in neighborhood, 
college, business or church. And in order to bring about 
change in their human relations we shall need not only prac- 
tical social engineering but also a more subtle education of 
attitudes and, not least, education through personal example. 

3. And that leads into the last of our summary questions: 
What habits shall we try to train in ourselves that will help 
us to deal with problems in human relationships with increas- 
ing sureness and facility? ? 


This matter of consciously training in oneself good habits of reaction 
to situations that embody a problem for moral conduct or a conflict 
of loyalties is so important as to deserve special study and, in the 
case of group discussion, an extra session devoted to the subject. The 
following sources will be found helpful and contain references to other 
material of interest in this connection: William H. Burnham, The 
Normal Mind, D. Appleton & Co., 1925, Chapter VII (702 pp. Price, 
$3.50) ; William James, Psychology, Henry Holt & Co., 1892, Chapter X. 


APPENDIX A 


Suggestions to Discussion Leaders 


For the purpose of conducting a group through the outline 
here presented, it is desirable that the leader familiarize her- 
self with the preceding volume of the Inquiry on race relations, 
entitled And Who Is My Neighbor? and especially with the 
hints there given as to a serviceable method of procedure 
(Appendix II, p. 222). It is desirable also that she should 
have at least a speaking acquaintance with the philosophy 
and methods of a modern technique of discussion, and to this 
end the pamphlet of the Inquiry, Creative Discussion,’ is 
recommended. 

Try to avoid misunderstandings through different mean- 
ings for common expressions. When there seems to be such 
a misunderstanding, direct the attention of the group to the 
necessity of using words in their precise meaning, and try to 
secure agreement upon definitions of abstract expressions that 
are likely to recur from time to time in any discussion of race 
relations. (See Appendix I, p. 209, of And Who Is My Neigh- 
bor?) Incidentally, it is best to make explanations such as 
these, even if they require time, at the point where the need 
for them first arises rather than to precede the discussions 
by an overlong prelude of warnings and directions. 

To save time, it is desirable to have the members of the 
group read in advance as much of the text as is likely to be 
used in the following session, and to make special assignments 
of readings or other reporting (such, for example, as inquiries 
into facts concerning local conditions in regard to specific 
matters). For the leader it is practically essential not only 
to have read in advance the necessary portion of the outline 
but to form a tentative plan for the discussion hour—expect- 


*The Woman’s Press and Association Press, 1926. Price, $1.35. 
128 


Appendix 129 


ing, of course, to see it modified by the turns of interest in the 
group. 

This book is not intended as a series of lessons to be too 
closely followed. Criticisms of the text springing from its 
use are especially invited, as are also additional questions and 
examples that might make future editions more useful to 
other women desiring help in the discussion of our topic. 
There is nothing binding or final about the arrangement of 
the material; in fact, to some of the chapters it may be well 
to devote a number of sessions. Others the group may prefer 
to leave unfinished. That does not matter, so long as there 
is not the feeling that it is necessary to cover every point in 
the outline, however superficially. The aim should be, rather, 
to carry as far as the time allows those interests that are of 
vital concern to the group and produce not only discussion 
but an opportunity for experimental action. In the same way, 
it will be better to discuss intensively a single well reported 
incident that is to the point than merely to pile up illustra- 
tions. In some cases, a good hour’s discussion may be had by 
trying to fill in the unrecorded details of a single illustrative 
example, until the character and motives of every person in it 
become clear, the sketchy background is filled in, and the 
group has looked at the issue from the point of view of each 
of the persons or groups involved. 

One more word is needed in explanation of the scope of 
this outline. An effort has been made, so far as possible, to 
limit the material to matters that fall within the knowledge 
and interests of those asked to discuss them. But a departure 
from that principle is necessary, as has been indicated in the 
Introduction, to secure an understanding for the larger social 
issues within which the immediate situations and questions so 
often fall. It is not always possible to understand the imme- 
diate situations under our eyes, and the problems that arise 
from them, without having regard to larger implications. 
Therefore, we have to go rather fully into a few big subjects, 
such as race fusion, where a wide range of experience may 
help to throw light on a local or personal difficulty. 


APPENDIX B 


Summary of Discussion Sequence 


It will be well for the leader to have before her at each 
meeting that part or section of this plan which is likely to 
be covered, so that she can at any time find the bearings by 
which to guide the thought in an orderly advance. 


DISCUSSION I 
Attitudes Toward Race Difference 
Chapter I, pp. 1-4 


A. Giving the test. 
See that individual copies are available and have the 
schedule on the blackboard before the meeting begins. 
Summarize by calling for a show of hands on the feelings 
registered for each racial group. 


B. Discussing the test. 


1. At what points in the summary is there marked di- 
versity of feeling? 


2. What reasons are given for the attitudes taken in 
these instances? 
—Why does one kind of contact seem essentially dif- 
ferent from another kind? 


3. What differences in experience appear between those 
who take one attitude and those who take a wholly 
different attitude? 

—From the experiences mentioned, list what seem to 
be the sources of people’s attitudes towards race 
difference; for example, parents’ attitudes, news- 
paper anecdotes and cartoons, moving pictures, mis- 
sion studies, personal contacts with foreigners. 


4. What kinds of experience, or what sources of impres- 
130 


Appendix 131 


sions, seem to do most in building people’s attitudes 

toward persons of different race? 

—Do these differences in impressive effect among the 
sources of attitudes point to possible lines of effort, 
in case it were desired to change attitudes? 


DISCUSSION II 
Association Across Race Lines 
Chapter I, pp. 4-15 


. What forms of neighborhood contact involve personal rela- 

tions across race lines? 

. How are people reacting to them? 

—In what ways do their reactions make for bad feeling or 
loss of social understanding in the neighborhood? 

. What fears, embarrassments and actual dislikes seem to 

be at the bottom of people’s disinclination to associate 

across race lines in the neighborhood? 

—Loss of social standing?—Intermarriage? 

. Can we classify our neighborhood contacts with people of 

different racial groups according to the seriousness of the 

social consequences of acting in them one way or another? 

—Which of them seem to raise questions of habitual per- 
sonal manners, tastes and good-feeling? 

—Which of them raise questions as to possible social re- 
arrangements as between one group and another? 

—Which of them raise fundamental questions as to race 
fusion and the preserving of our cultural heritage? 


. What can we agree on as minimum steps toward race 
adjustments in the neighborhood that would not commit 
us to changes further than we mean to go? 
DISCUSSION III 
Personal Relations at School and College 
Chapter II, pp. 16-36 


. Which of the situations recounted in this chapter seem to 
raise questions of feeling and conduct in one’s personal 


132 


All Colors 


associations without necessarily raising large questions as 
to desirable social arrangements? 


. What similar situations have been experienced or heard 


of by members of the group? 

How do these situations differ in the degree of intimacy 
that they involve in the personal relations? 

How far are the divisive attitudes kept up by the fact that 
between school and college students the ‘‘best”’ sides of 
different racial groups have no chance of being shown? 


. In what ways would students and officers at college be 


willing to try to get the best sides of racially different 

groups known—those of each group to the other? 

—In what cases do the present conferees seem disposed 
to act conservatively ?—in what cases experimentally ?— 
in what cases ‘‘diplomatically”? 

—Do these cases differ in the degree of intimacy involved? 
Or do they seem to involve larger questions of social 
policy? 


DISCUSSION IV 
Social Action at’School and College 
Chapter II, pp. 36-42 


Where a maladjustment between students of racially dif- 

ferent groups seems to call for social rather than individual 

action, what choices have we— 

—within the class or discussion group; 

—within the larger organization or institution of which it is 
part; 

—through codperation with a specializing outside agency 

(such as a social settlement or an Americanization class) ? 

Similarly, what choices or opportunities are there for social 

education within similar limits? 

Examine some concrete proposals for social engineering: 

—Do they meet the need? 

—Are they within the power of those who advocate them? 

—Are they related to a larger aim of adjustment between 
racially different groups? 


Appendix 133 


. What individual efforts toward inter-racial harmony might 

serve as examples to follow? 

—What would be the effect of their widespread imitation? 

—What, in such examples as commend themselves, was 
attempted, what were the actual results? 

—What can we learn from failures in efforts of this kind? 


DISCUSSION V 
Personal Relations in Shop and Office 
Chapter III, pp. 43-69 


. Why and how are members of some racial groups excluded 

from employment opportunities? 

—What difference is there between a policy of exclusion 
and one of preference? 

—How and why do employers ascertain the preferences of 
their employees as regards associations with persons of 
other races or nationalities? 

—What part in the attitudes of workers toward those of 
other races than their own is played by considerations of 
personal efficiency, of competition, of social prestige? 

. Why and how are members of some groups discriminated 
against when employed in the same places or occupations 
with those of other groups? 

—in promotion, assignment of work, security of job, per- 
sonal consideration? 

. On what underlying assumptions are based these differ- 
ences in treatment? 

—as regards competency, personal habits, morality, etc.; 

—as regards social superiority and inferiority ; 

—as regards congeniality? 

. From the point of view of larger economic problems, what 

are some of the reasons for or against equality of industrial 

opportunities for all? 
(For example, as regards maintenance of standards, or- 
ganization for mutua: defense, professional pride and 
discipline, etc.) 

. What privileges over others, if any, has a worker the right 

to expect— 


134 All Colors 


—if she is native and not immigrant, 
—if she is of old and not of recent American stock, 
—if she is white and not black or yellow or brown? 


6. Which of the situations considered present tasks for one 
desirous to create greater harmony between the races? 
—Tasks for changes in individual behavior? 

—Tasks for social engineering or education? 

—Tasks requiring further clarification through the study 
of larger issues involved than those apparent in the 
immediate situation? 


DISCUSSION VI 
Relations in Church and Other Religious Associations 
Chapter IV, pp. 70-89 


1. What are some of the special opportunities of contacts 
under religious auspices for inter-racial understanding? 


2. What are some of the special difficulties of practicing in 
and through such contacts the religious principles taught? 


3. How far must a religious organization go to satisfy the 
prevailing public opinion in the community in these mat- 
ters? 


4. What would you include in a set of minimum demands 
upon a church or religious association as regards relations 
between their members with those of other races? 

[Be sure that such terms as “justice,” “understanding,” 
“appreciation,” etc., are used only as they bear upon con- 
crete situations, and that the group agrees upon their 
meaning. | 7 
—What differences in experiences, home backgrounds, and 
the like, account for diversity of opinion on such minimum 
standards? 


—Must practices be condoned in some communities which 
in others would be condemned as intolerant or un- 
christian? 


5. In what situations, or in regard to what races, would nor- 
mal standards of conduct toward members of racially dif- 
ferent groups not apply? 


Appendix 135 


—Is there a difference in permissible behavior toward 
racially near and racially distant groups? 

—Does it make any difference, so far as standards of con- 
duct to members of other racial groups are concerned, 
whether they are Protestant, Catholic, Jewish or Mo- 
hammedan? 

. Can we classify the contacts—both within the church or 

religious organization and of it toward an outside group of 

different race—according to the special opportunities they 
provide for exemplifying a religious spirit? 

—In what situations is it a question of personal right 
feeling? 

—In what situations is there a task within the religious 
organization itself, necessitating a reform of group atti- 
tudes? 

—In what cases are questions involved that raise not only 
fundamental religious concepts but large scientific prob- 
lems with which the group does not as yet feel competent 
to grapple? 

[List some of the outstanding problems of the last-named 

category for further study. | 


Make sure that assignments of serious reading in prepa- 
ration for the next discussion are made in line with the 
suggestions given at the opening of Chapter V, p. 93 
and p. 107. 


DISCUSSION VII 
Race Fusion and Intermarriage 
Chapter V, pp. 90-104 


. What were some of the situations in previous discussions 
in which a choice between two or more forms of behavior 
or solutions for a problem in race relations was felt to 
imply a stand on the matter of race fusion? 

. Why are contacts that may lead to “intermarriage” re- 
garded as particularly troublesome in their demands upon 
conduct? 

. What, in the main, is the evidence on the existence of 


136 All Colers 


“nure” races and the relative cultural heights achieved by 
pure and mixed peoples? : 
4. What are some of the main contentions of science as re- 

gards the probable biological effects of intermarriage? 

—What seeming disagreements are there among authorities 
and how may these, perhaps, be accounted for by the 
different nature of their preoccupations? 

—What seeming disagreements are there between the dif- 
ferent pronouncements of the same authority on various 
aspects of the matter? 


5. If there is doubt concerning the final answer of science as 
regards the physical results of race fusion, what attitude 
must we take toward intermarriage? 

—What interests must we consider: that of the race to 
which we belong? That of civilization as at present 
understood in the western world? ‘That of the sup- 
posedly backward or inferior group? That of humanity 
at large? 

—How may some or all of these interests be served simul- 
taneously, so far as our attitude to race fusion is con- 
cerned? 

—Can different races become culturally alike and keep 
biologically apart? What nature of relationship between 
them would be necessary to bring about such contact 
with separation? 


Make sure that assignments af reading in preparation for 
the next discussion are made in line with the suggestions 
contained in the latter part of Chapter V, p. 104 and p. 108. 


DISCUSSION VIII 
Racial Superiority and Inferiority 
Chapter V, pp. 104-109 


Note: A fuller discussion outline on this topic ts given in the Occa- 
stonal Papers of the Inquiry for February, 1926, and may, if 
desired, be substituted in whole or in part for this section. 


1. What do we mean by racial superiority? 
—Can we separate the biological from the cultural factors 
in the make-up of a racial group? 


Appendix 137 


—On what evidence do we base our rating of different 
races as to their degrees of superiority and inferiority? 


. By what standards are we to measure the superiority of 

one race over another? 

—By what standards do we measure that of individuals? 

—How do our personal experiences, characteristics, likes, 
affect such a rating? 

—What interests determine our standards in rating dif- 
ferent groups—our own, those of our nation, those of 
humanity? 

. What bearing have the qualities which we personally or as 

a group may like in other racial groups upon their own 

interests—even so fundamental a matter as their ability to 

survive? 


. What more must we know of the relation between the bio- 


logical and the political, economic and cultural factors in 

world society before we can judge of the desirability or un- 

desirability of race fusion? 

. What other social aims and purposes must we definitely 

have before us before we can have a satisfactory criterion 

for the measurement of racial superiority? 

—Is there a eugenic ideal that we can all accept? 

—Can we agree upon an ideal for the future of our coun- 
try? 

oy type of human society for the world at large do we 
desire for the more distant future? 


Make sure that assignments of reading in preparation for 


the next discussion are made in line with the suggestions 
contained in Chapter VI, p. 118. 


DISCUSSION IX 
The “American Race” 
Chapter VI, pp. 110-114 


1. Is America “in the making” or is it racially and culturally 


a finished product? 
—What difference in political, economic or cultural view- 
point separates those who look upon America as “be- 


138 All Colors 


coming” from those who look upon it as “being” or 
“ceasing to be’? 

—What are some of the major characteristics of America? 

2. Which factors in what we look upon as typically Ameri- 
can traits seem to have a biological origin, and which seem 
due to environmental circumstances? 

3. In what ways, other than biological fusion, has white 
America been changed by contact with other races? 

—In what ways and why do the newer immigrant groups 
differ, so far as cultural values are concerned, from those 
who came in earlier times? 

4. What values do those have in mind who would preserve 
the purity of the American cultural heritage if they could? 
—How would different parts of the country differ in stating 

these values? 

—How have these values come into being? 

—What would be likely to happen to these values if varied 
contacts with other cultures were as far as possible sup- 
pressed ? 


DISCUSSION X 
National Aims and Human Welfare 
Chapter VI, pp. 114-127 


1. What are some of the different interests in our American 
immigration policy? 

—Do all racial groups in America today have the same 
stake in it? 

2. Is there at the present time a problem of overpopulation? 
—On the North American continent? 

—Elsewhere in the world which threatens America? 

—What constitutes overpopulation? 

—With what interests or concerns is fear of overpopula- 
tion usually associated? 

3. What, in the light of historical happenings elsewhere, 
would be the probable consequences on relations between 
the existing racial groups in America of the general as- 
sumption that there is now a white American race that 
must be kept pure? 


Appendix 139 


—What are some of the outstanding larger programs for 
the future of the American Negro? 

4. What is your ideal for the racial future of America? 

5. Brought down to matters of individual conduct, what does 
the general aim of social policy decided upon as most 
nearly corresponding to our feeling and knowledge involve 
in costs — 

—In terms of tastes, customs, habits; 
—In social amenities; 
—In integrity of character? 
Summary: What have we learned that will affect our thought 
and action on problems of race relations? 
—What more do we need to know? 
—What social programs do we sponsor or are we 
committed to take part in? 
—What habits shall we try to develop in our- 
selves? 


APPENDIX C 


I. Report of an Inter-Racial Group 


At the beginning of the autumn quarter, last year, there 
were twenty-six colored girls at the university. Until that 
time the colored girls had had no contacts with the white girls 
outside of classes, and they had taken no part in the activities 
of the Y. W. C. A. Through the efferts of several white girls, 
who wished to know the colored group better, Miss X, one of 
the national secretaries of the Y. W. C. A. for colored students, 
was obtained for a week early in November. A regular ves- 
pers meeting, open to all, was given over to her, and she spoke 
on ‘Negro Contributions.” There also was a musical program 
given by some of the colored girls. 

Separate group meetings of colored and of white women 
were arranged to meet with Miss X and culminated in a joint 
discussion meeting of all the colored girls and about an equal 
number of white girls, who were particularly interested. There 
was no general announcement of these meetings. The joint 
meeting spontaneously formed a permanent inter-racial dis- 
cussion group, made up of fourteen members, equally repre- 
senting both races and headed by co-chairmen. The group met 
every two weeks, with frequent extra meetings for special af- 
fairs. This group had the advantage of being composed of 
leading personalities of both races. The colored members 
represented varied points of view, the northern and southern, 
that of the entirely eolored school and that of the white uni- 
versity. The white members represented varying degrees of 
racial prejudice. 

At first the group’s interest was entirely in getting to know 
one another and in comparing impressions and experiences. 
The group soon learned to sing the Negro National Anthem. 

140 


Appendix 141 


Miss M, of the University Settlement, spoke at a large open 
meeting. Later the group met with the Inter-racial Com- 
mittee of Club Women, of which Miss M. is chairman. The 
members lunched together at a colored tearoom. Individual 
members began doing things together, such as writing group 
term papers and attending various meetings on the campus. 
Four colored girls went as delegates of the Y. W. C. A. to a 
Student Volunteer Convention and brought back for discus- 
sion the findings of the convention as to inter-racial relation- 
ships. 

The outstanding event of the winter quarter was a trip given 
by the colored for the white members through the colored com- 
munity of the city. About forty people were conveyed in 
automobiles, lent by wealthy colored citizens, to visit the 
banks, hotels, insurance companies, the office of the principal 
Negro newspaper, some of the wealthy colored homes and 
other real estate owned by colored people, also a Negro school 
of music. The group stopped for lunch at the home of one of 
the colored girls. This glimpse of the colored community was 
a revelation to many of the white girls. 

At the end of the winter quarter, a second group of four- 
teen was formed. Both groups now undertook the study of 
local conditions on the basis of a published report concerning 
Negro-white relations in the city. The members took turns 
in leading a meeting on one subject, such as education, each 
adding to the material of the book from her own experience. 
Some work was done for the Sociology Department in collect- 
ing illustrations of different forms of inter-racial relationships. 

In the spring quarter, the Inter-racial Committee gave a 
Sunday afternoon tea and a musical recital by Mme. Cole- 
Talbert, a noted colored singer. Between eighty and ninety 
people, about equally representative of the two races, at- 
tended this affair. One of the colored guests said afterward 
that it was the only inter-racial affair that she had ever at- 
tended where there was no feeling of “constraint and no pat- 
ronage upon the part of the white people.” 

The meetings for the school year ended with a supper party 


142 All Colors 


for the twenty-eight members of both groups at the home of 
one of the white members. An unexpected naturalness and 
frankness marked all these inter-racial contacts. There is no 
doubt that a sense of comradeship was achieved in both groups. 
It is the intention of the committee to increase the membership 
and the number of small, informal discussion groups next 
year. 


II. Reconciliation Trips 


More than five years ago, the Rev. and Mrs. Clarence V. 
Howell, who had been conducting a forum in New York City, 
started guiding trips through radical labor headquarters to get 
at first hand, and in an environment that would make for 
honesty of expression, contacts with the critics of modern 
society and of the churches. This program soon broadened out 
to include the centers of other distinctive cultures, economic 
classes or racial groups. Later there were added trips to be- 
come acquainted with the peoples of many lands who, often 
erroneously thought of as in themselves homogeneous, really 
continue in the New World an astonishing variety both of cul- 
tural and religious traditions and of occupational and domestic 
customs—and the distinctive attitudes that arise from them. 
A further widening of the program brought into its purview 
the centers also of conflicting viewpoints in politics, economics 
and philosophy of life—including visits not only to the tem- 
ples of modern religious cults, for example, but also to ancient 
synagogues, not only to the meeting rooms of the I. W. W. 
but also to the National Association of Manufacturers, not 
only to pacifist reunions but also to military headquarters. 

In all these trips, the object has been conceived as a study 
of social groups through first-hand contact, with the purpose 
of enhanced mutual understanding and—reconciliation. Each 
trip—there are about two each month between October and 
May—is carefully prepared, so as to include a variety of im- 
pressions and contacts, yet also a rounded picture of an ethnic 
group or social problem (such as the “bread line,” for exam- 


Appendix 143 


ple) asa whole. The program for the spring of 1926 includes 
trips for the study of Arabian Culture, Latin-American Rela- 
tions, American Civil Liberties, Prisons, Japanese Cultural 
Centers, Negro Harlem. Earlier trips have been to China- 
town, Industrial and Labor Centers, Rochdale Cooperative, 
Psychic Science, Jewish Centers and others. Most of the 
trips are made on Saturday afternoon and evening, but occa- 
sionally the trip commences with an event on the previous 
evening and concludes with a church service on Sunday morn- 
ing. Instead of giving a general description of these study 
trips within the metropolis, their actual nature and influence 
may perhaps better be gleaned from the notes made by one 
of the participants in a visit on February 27, 1926, to Negro 
Harlem: 


Who Went on the Trip: ‘The group numbered about eighty 
to one hundred persons. They were mainly from Teachers 
College, International House and miscellaneous educational 
institutions. About 90 per cent were women, The men were 
mostly foreign, some Chinese and Japanese. The mood of the 
group was quiet and serious—there was no air of sightseeing 
or curiosity. One might say that they were in the main out 
for education and would in all probability pass on to their 
classes what they saw. 


The Trip Itself: 1. The trip commenced with a free lecture 
by James Weldon Johnson on the Aisthetic Culture of Negro 
Peoples in the United States. The lecture, given in Milbank 
Chapel, was attended by over two hundred people, about half 
of whom went on the trip. 

The audience was pleased with the lecturer and delighted 
with his poems which he read, especially “The Creation,” 
which he recited beautifully. After the lecture and poems a 
number of questions were asked, for the most part on points 
covered in the lecture—for example, what were the names of 
some of the new Negro artists and writers? What were the 
titles of some books by Negroes worth reading? Where could 
they be obtained? 

2. The lecture over, the group assembled to take the street 
car to the first point: some of the best residential streets of 


144 All Colors 


Harlem. Here the beautiful residences designed by Stanford 
White were pointed out. 


3. The next was a visit to the Abyssinian Baptist Church, 
the largest Negro Baptist Church in Harlem. The group was 
shown through the community house which is a part of the 
church, and the various activities of the church were men- 
tioned. The group was received in a spacious, well-furnished 
ladies’ lounge by the pastor, the Rev. A. Clayton Powell, a 
pleasant, distinguished-looking gentleman with long, wavy 
hair which he wears after the manner of European violinists. 
He conducted the group through the house from gymnasium to 
roof garden and finally to the church auditorium, a beautiful 
hall, with stained-glass windows from England and a marble 
pulpit from Italy. The pastor gave the main facts about the 
church membership, average attendance, baptisms, etc., de- 
scribed the services and activities, and the essentials of the 
religious spirit of the congregation. Many questions were 
asked after the talk, chiefly about the work of the church. 


4. As it seemed a good place in which to speak, Mr. Ira 
Reid, industrial secretary of the Urban League, came to the 
church and spoke to the group there of the work of that social 
agency. Less diplomatic than the minister, this intelligent 
young Negro spoke of the bad housing conditions in that part 
of the city and of the ill effects of low wages and high rents. 
He made no attempt to idealize the Negro and showed both 
sides of the picture—that is, he spoke not only of evils suf- 
fered but also those inflicted upon their neighbors by certain 
types of colored profiteers. 


5. The group then visited the new headquarters of the 
Urban League and codperating social agencies, a reconstructed 
building not quite ready to be occupied. 


6. Next came a visit to the headquarters of the Y. W. C. A. 
where there were four speakers. The first was Louis H. Berry 
of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored 
People, a Negro, almost white, very amiable and very self- 
possessed. He spoke without emotion, almost in a monotone, 
on some of the most controversial questions—describing the 
work of the N. A. A. C. P., especially its campaign against 
lynching. He also spoke of the undemocratic nature of segre- 
gation, especially in education, and argued for the legality of 


Appendix 145 


intermarriage when necessary to protect the Negro woman. 
There was, of course, lively discussion on this topic, but it was 
calm and dispassionate. 

A third speaker, Mr. Crossthwaite, a Negro labor organizer, 
spoke of the Negro’s economic condition. 


7. The group then broke up into smaller groups for dinner 
at different colored restaurants. The restaurants were quiet 
and the food was good. 


8. After dinner the party reassembled to hear spirituals 
sung at Grace Church. The choirmaster explained the origin 
of the spirituals and the choir sang them beautifully. The 
minister of the church also spoke to the group. 


9. The last point on the trip was a visit to the synagogue 
of the colored Jews. This was a small room seating about 
sixty people. Rabbi Ford, who is a poet, sang one of his 
hymns. He was dressed in ordinary dress but wore a turban. 
He explained something about this Jewish congregation but 
did not tell much of its origin. He did mention, with a trace 
of bitterness, that perhaps “Black Jews” was the blackest 
name that could be given to any ethnic group in America. The 
service proceeded with prayers, chants and an explanation of 
the significance of the story of Esther. 


Worth of the Trip: Considered as a whole, the trip to Har- 
lem was of real educational value. The points of interest 
covered were well chosen. Facts were brought out by compe- 
tent speakers, and ample time was allowed for questions. 
There was no air of anything having been staged for the occa- 
sion. The cumulative effect of seeing and hearing so many 
interesting colored speakers in one afternoon was excellent. 
There we learned that there are as many different types among 
colored folk as among white: conservatives, liberals and radi- 
cals; all educated, speaking suavely, humanely, or with bit- 
terness; one mildly independent, another anxious to cooperate; 
all speaking with faultless grammar. The effect was impres- 
sive and could not easily be thrown off. 


Here are some of the “attendant learnings’: 


1. The Negroes are capable of taking care of themselves. 
2. They are independent, and they know it. 


146 All Colors 


3. They are quiet and thoughtful—we have had the wrong 
idea about them—especially about their religion. 

4. They take to education naturally—as a matter of course, 
just as we do. 

5. Their standards of living are good—depend on their 
economic status—as witness the neatness of the streets 
in the better districts. 


6. Their diction and style are often admirable. 


III. The Reform of an Institutional Program 


The following account may be useful for three reasons: It 
shows how a consistent following up of agreements reached 
through group study of race relations may affect the thought 
and activities of an important organization. It indicates the 
stages of conference and experiment through which a convic- 
tion may be carried into action with common consent. And it 
illustrates the part which, on occasion, a resourceful and pa- 
tient colored woman may play in helping to create a better 
understanding of the practical problems faced by her group 
and to open for it new doors of opportunity. 


THE Occasion. Early in the fall of the year, a Negro girl 
was excluded from the sewing-class in one of the branches of 
the Young Women’s Christian Association in a large northern 
city. This is how it happened: The teacher, on receiving 
the application of the colored girl, asked her before registering 
her to talk the matter over with the general secretary of the 
branch. Why, she did not say; but the girl concluded that she 
was not desired in the class and immediately left the building. 
She gave others in the Negro community the impression that 
there had been a definite exclusion from this institution on 
account of race. There were at that time two colored girls 
enrolled in the Association’s activities for school girls, and at 
one time some colored women had been members of a class for 
recreation leaders. 

This would have been the end of the matter at any time 
during the previous few years. But, as it happened, only a 


Appendix 147 


few weeks ago members of this Association, with others, had 
attended a summer conference for industrial girls where the 
relations between white and colored women had been under 
discussion. A number of Negro girls from other cities had 
been in attendance, and among other things there had been 
talk of the participation of colored girls in Y. W. C. A. work. 
The same subject also had been discussed that summer at a 
week-end conference of business girls where plans were made 
for a further study of the subject of relations between the two 
races. 

There was therefore a background of interest when the inci- 
dent concerning the colored girl’s application for membership 
in the sewing-class became known. The membership secre- 
tary of the branch in which the girl had applied, before know- 
ing of her withdrawal, submitted the application to the general 
secretary of the Association and asked what she was expected 
to do in such a case. The teacher who had interviewed the 
girl, on being asked, said that it had been her understanding 
of the Association’s policy that no Negro girl was allowed in 
any of its activities. An examination of the records showed, 
however, that this never had been the stated policy. On the 
other hand it was clear that very little had been done at any 
time to make known this fact and to encourage the participa- 
tion of colored women in the work of the Association. There 
had been “difficult” situations of uncertainty before which 
had been smoothed over; yet nothing had been done to create 
a more definite policy. In the case under review, the teacher 
thought the white women in her class would not meet with this 
colored girl; she was willing herself, however, to teach a group 
of colored girls if enough cared to join such a group. 


Poticy Puannine. At this point, the general secretary of 
the Association sent for a Negro social worker in the city for 
whom she had great respect, to consult with her as to possible 
forms of action. Her own opinion was that, with the pre- 
vailing feeling, the organization of a separate class for colored 
girls was the only thing that could be done to meet the demand 
of the colored applicant for lessons in dressmaking. ‘This, 


148 All Colors 


she thought, might be the first step in a more considered plan 
for the future, as regards both the promotion of a better under- 
standing between the races and a more real participation of 
both races in the Association’s activities. 

The Negro social worker’s first request was that the girl 
who had considered herself excluded be brought back for a 
talk with the general secretary, so that she might learn that 
the Association did not, as a matter of policy, discriminate 
against her race and was, in fact, considering a more satisfac- 
tory course of procedure. This was done, but the colored girl 
said she would not now join any class whatsoever—and de- 
cidedly not the proposed “Jim Crow class”; in fact, she did not 
now wish to be considered a candidate for membership. Be- 
fore the interview was over, she did, however, realize that, 
even though she was not willing to help, a new situation might 
develop in the Association; and she left with a less embittered 
feeling. 

The colored social worker also agreed to meet with four or 
five of the secretaries to discuss the whole program of the 
Association in its relation to the Negro women of the city. It 
was agreed that any new policy must rest on a more intimate 
knowledge of the situation than that which the present mem- 
bers and officers of the Association had. It was agreed also 
that full admission of the colored people to the privileges of 
the Association could not be said to exist until conscious and 
intelligent effort had been made to render the work of the 
Association of value to the colored people of the community. 
This had been done successfully for the many foreign-born 
groups in the community. And, of course, the policies would 
have to be so clear that personal interpretations on the part 
of individuals in the Association would in the future be less 
likely to deviate from the consensus of opinion. The fol- 
lowing plan was formulated: 


1. That the discussion groups of members give time to fur- 
ther study of the history of the Negro people and of the rela- 
tions between the two races in America. 


2. That talks be given to as many groups in the Association 


Appendix 149 


as possible by colored speakers of the city—especially con- 
cerning the history of the Negroes in the community. 

3. That there be exchange visits, where these promised to 
be helpful, between groups of white Association members and 
groups of colored girls in churches and other organizations. 

4. That various committees and governing bodies of the 
Association discuss further practical plans for recognizing the 
responsibilities of.the Association to the Negroes in the com- 
munity. 


This question was subsequently brought before many groups 
and committees. Colored women of the community were in- 
vited to address some of these meetings; and the social worker 
previously mentioned met with several committees to discuss 
informally the wisdom of the further participation of colored 
women in the various activities. The committee of manage- 
ment of the branch in which the incident of virtual exclusion 
had arisen, discussed this particular situation and possible 
ways of avoiding similar occurrences in the future. In all 
these discussions, the Negro social worker not only gave 
much of her time but genuinely tried to understand the fears 
of some of the white people and patiently to set right with 
them obvious misunderstandings. 


SomE Resuuts. One result of facing the problem in this 
frank manner was a recommendation from the committee just 
mentioned to the board of directors of the whole Association 
that in future no line of discrimination be drawn against the 
Negro women and girls of the city. This was adopted by the 
board, and the whole Association set about the task of making 
more real the participation of both races. 

Again the Negro social worker met with different secre- 
taries at their request and helped them plan activities in which 
Negro girls would not only be beneficiaries but also might have 
contributions to make. Here are some of the incidental out- 
comes: 


Colored girls applying for admission to the educational 
classes were admitted without question. 


150 All Colors 


When a speaker of interest to girls in industry came to the 
city and a special gathering was held, a point was made of 
inviting Negro girls in industry who were known to the social 
worker. , 

Several colored girls who had expressed a desire to study 
methods of leadership in group activities were invited to join 
such a class held for business girls. 

Groups of colored girls began to form both in the Girl Re- 
serve and industrial departments, meeting—as did all the 
groups in these departments—in the sections where the girls 
lived. 

The following summer, colored school girls went to the 
Association camp with white school girls. They had never 
been invited to use the camp before. 

A colored woman was elected to the board of directors of 
the Association. 

One week-end conference of white members, after dinoussine 
the basis of their race prejudices and recognizing the social 
causes of their disinclination to work with colored girls, sent 
a recommendation to the board of directors asking that the 
Association lead the way in giving the Negro women of the 
city fair opportunities of employment—more specifically, by 
appointing on the stenographic staff of the Association a com- 
petent colored girl as soon as an opening should occur. 


Of course, difficulties of procedure did not suddenly cease. 
Whenever they arose, the colored social worker gave willingly 
of her time and thought to the planning of methods which 
would solve these problems in such a way as to increase 
mutual understanding between the two racial groups and to 
promote the growth of intelligent participation by the Negro 
group. 


IV. A Literary Club 


It is sometimes said that mutual understanding between 
members of different groups is best advanced by having them 
jointly pursue some specific interest or hobby without stress- 
ing the racial factor. With some such aim several years 
ago in an eastern city a literary club was formed by several 


Appendix 151 


persons of literary tastes, white and colored, who had en- 
joyed a friendship of some years’ standing and desired to bring 
together others of their friends. The white friends invited to 
join the club were warned that the colored members were 
probably tired of discussing race problems and wished to be 
treated as individuals and not as members of a distinct group. 

Purely by accident, the original white members of the circle, 
writes one of them, were all either married or over thirty years 
of age, so that the scandal-mongers had little chance for assert- 
ing that every white member was intent upon marrying a col- 
ored member: “Our not quite approving friends saw that it 
was possible to shake hands, say Mr. and Miss, and drink 
lemonade with colored people without anything very terrible 
happening as a result.”” The white members, he adds, not only 
lost whatever sense of racial superiority they may have had, 
but they even lost the smug satisfaction of being without race 
prejudice. As for some of the colored members, they have con- 
fessed that these monthly meetings have helped them to over- 
come a sense of bitterness against the white race. 

This club has now been going for a number of years. It has 
a program committee of two white and two colored members 
who plan for about seven evenings each winter. Among recent 
visiting literary celebrities who have addressed this club were 
Dorothy Canfield, Countee Cullen, Paul Robeson, Sarah 
Cleghorn and Jessie Fauset. The members themselves and 
their friends usually provide readings and music. The meet- 
ings last about two hours, the last of them given over to in- 
formal conversation and refreshments. Since it meets in the 
homes of members, the club restricts its membership to twenty 
white and twenty colored members, and there is a waiting 
list of both groups. The subject of race is neither brought in 
nor intentionally avoided in the discussions; it has simply be- 
come non-essential, 


INDEX 


Adams, Romanzo, 107 

AXsthetic judgments, 5, 98, 106 

America “in the making,” 111 

American Journal of Nursing, 51 

Association between 
status, 4, 5, 6, 15, 21, 46, 58, 
72, 86, 91, 104, 105 


Blasio, Signora de, 49 

Boas, Franz, 94 

Bogardus, E. S., 1, 28 
British stock, 95 

Brooks, Charles A., 75 
Bruce, Roscoe Conkling, 107 
Bryce, James, 95, 98, 115 


Christian Work, 75 
Churches, chap. IV 
Civil service, 44 
College, 
contacts in, chap. II 
separate, 25 
Commons, John R., 49 
Congeniality, 16, 64 
Contacts, 
classification of, 12, 32, 65, 85 
degrees of intimacy in, 3, 24, 28, 
32, 46, 63, 65, 85 
types of personal, 3, 4, 14, 15, 17 
et seq., 22 et seq., 45 et seq, 
62, 70 
Cox, Edward §&., 121 
Crisis, The, 23, 55, 104 
Culture, standards of, 74 et seq., 
91, 97 et seq., 103, 112 


Dewey, John, 126 
Drachsler, Julius, 93, 98 


race and 


East, Edward M., 118 
Education 
of social opinion, 82, 125, ap- 
pendix C 
through contact, 10, 11, 22, 28, 
27 et seq. 
through social action, 39 
Efficiency, relative, 48 et seq., 56, 
99, 106 
Employment, 
43 et seq. 
Etiquette, 14, 35, 68 
Eugenic ideals, 108 
Evans, William L., 49 


discrimination ‘in, 


Foerster, Robert F., 99 
Foreign students’ comments, 20 
Franklin, Benjamin, 115 


Girls’ Friendly Society. 77 


Habits, training of, 127 
Harvard University, 16, 107 
Henry, Alice, 59 

Henry Street Settlement, 52 
Holmes, S. J., 93, 96 

Hospital Library, 51 
Hourwich, Isaac A., 61 
Huntington, Ellsworth, 93, 108 


Immigration policy, chap. VI 
Intelligence tests, 106 
Intermarriage, chap. V 
contacts leading to, 6, 24, 68, 
69, 89 
International reactions, 117 
Interracial organization, 28, 41, 140, 
150 


152 


Index 


James, William, 105, 127 
Johns Hopkins University, 55 


Kilpatrick, William Heard, 82 
King, Mrs. Louis M., 106 
Kroeber, A. L., 98, 104 


Labor organization, 59 et seq. 
Levine, Louis, 49 


McDougald, Elise, 56 

Melting pot, 114 

Miller, Herbert A., 118, 120 

Miscegenation, 89 

Moral standards, 56 et seq. 

Mother-in-law, cultural function 
of, 103 


National character, see race char- 
acter 

Negro, three programs for, 121 

Neighborhood contacts, chap. I 

Nicknames, 4, 20 

Nursing, profession of, 51-2 


Odencrantz, Louise C., 44 
Odors, 5 

Opportumty, 49, 50, 54 
Overpopulation, 69, 118 et seq. 


Personal example, 42, 74 

Prejudice, 88, 96 

Professional opportunities, 51, 63 

Promotion, discrimination in, 45, 
47, 54, 62, 67 

Public Health Nurse, The, 51 


Race 
attitude in children, 16 
character, assumptions as to, 26, 
43, 49, 56, 58 et seq., 64, 68, 81, 
93 et seq., 111 et seq. 
superiority, 47, 104 et seq. 
Reconciliation Trips, 142 


153 


Regional differences in attitudes, 
26, 31-2, 84 

Religious differences, 72, 98, 101, 
103, 113 

Reuter, Edward B., 118, 119 

Ross, E. A., 98 


“Second Generation,” 26 
Segregation in 
choral festival, 30 
church, 71 et seq. 
club, 24 
college, 17, 55 
fraternity, 21, 37, 90 
recreation, 6, 7, 14, 18, 22, 81 
residence, 18, 71, 81, 91 
restaurant 19, 81 
shopping, 6 
travel, 6, 15 
Seligmann, Herbert J., 121 
Shaw, Albert, 112 
Simpson, Gordon H., 50 
Smith-Hughes Act, 54 
Social action, 14, 36 et seq., 68, 72 
et seq., 83; appendix C 
Social contacts, chap. I, 22, 63, 
chap. IV 
Social distance test, 2, 91 
Stoddard, Lothrop, 111 
Survey, The, 56 


Teachers, opportunities for, 53 
Thomas, Jesse O., 54 


Wage discriminations, 47 et seq. 
Washington, George, 117 
Weatherford, W. D., 53, 54 
Wells, H. G., 116 

White, William Benjamin, 111 
Woofter, T. J., Jr., 50, 54, 121-2 


Yinwy Cv A) 
an interracial group, 140 
a local program reformed, 146 


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